
Class ^ ^ GQ^ i^ 



CQEDOtlGHT DEPOSm 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 



BY 



CHARLES VINCE 

AUTHOR OF "THE STREET OF FACES*' 



Happy is England! I could be content 
To see no other verdure than its own. 

— Keats, 



G. P. PUTNAM^S SONS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Ubc IftnlckerbocFiet ^vcss 

1922 






Copyright, 1922 

by 
Charles Vince 

Made in the United States of America 



g)riA654676 



/SS 




FEB 17 1922 



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no 



XTo 

MY FELLOW WAYFARER 

OF THREE THOUSAND 

MILES 



CONTENTS 








PAGE 

The Road 3 


The Two Valleys . 








5 


On Coming to the Downs 








15 


The Seafarer of the Downs . 








23 


The Old Man and Death 








33 


Shepherds' Romance 








39 


Great Roads . 








45 


The Scholar Roadmaker 








53 


Warrior Trees 








. 59 


The Road to Didling 








. 63 


Winter Woods 








. 71 


The Map 








. 75 


The Country Breakfast 








. 81 


The Thunderstorm 








. 87 


The Ln iLE Stream 








• 95 


The Exile 








. lOI 


Sheep on the Downs 








. 107 


[vii] 











CONTENTS 








PAGE 


Roads of War 115 


The Spring River . 






121 


The Country 'Bus . 






127 


The Enchanted Forest . 






133 


The Fishermen of Amberley . 






141 


The Magician of the Hills 






145 


The Adventurers . 






151 


The Village at the World's End 






157 


Windows .... 






163 



[ viii ] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 



[ij 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 



THE ROAD 

WE have not travelled very far, 
Nor ever have we gone 
To where the great adventures are, 
Nor Port Desire nor Calabar 
Have we ever looked upon. 

We go by the ploughed and tranquil field. 
By the woods where no fears hide. 
The forges are silent now in the weald 
Where a man no more has need of a shield 
Or a sword upon his side. 

But we can feel the galloping wind 
The quick cold strokes of the rain. 
And it matters not that we must find, 
Before the day is far behind, 
A road to the London train. 

For the sky that is high above Helicon 
Is as high above Gomshall Down, 
And a road is a road to travel on 
Or whether it start from Babylon 
Or out of Dorking town. 



t3) 



THE TWO VALLEYS 

OF the two valleys one was long and narrow, 
the other like half of a great bowl ; and the 
second valley, since it looked towards the north- 
east while the long valley looked towards the 
north-west, was the first to be filled by the sun- 
light in the morning and by the shadows in the 
evening. They opened into the same field, and 
other fields stretched down from them to a farm- 
house built of grey stone and flints, smooth and 
black as ice, with a ten-foot hedge of box round 
its garden, and a deep square porch of yew at its 
door. 

Since they were valleys in the chalk hills they 
were of a beautiful shape, looking as though they 
had been very carefully made by eyes and hands 
that loved true and pure lines. From year's end 
to year's end their turf was always short and 
green, and they were unadorned, although in 
summer their green was faintly dusted over with 
the red gold and the pale gold of trefoil and rock 
roses. 

To this cottage with the box hedge and the yew 

[51 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

porch came a young man, tired and troubled, and 
misanthropic. He may have been unhappy in 
love, or he may have been in debt, or he may 
have eaten and drunk too much, or, more prob- 
ably, since he had come to such a place, he had 
worked too hard and slept too little. When he 
came away he had told his friends that he was 
going to spread his mind out in the open for the 
wind and the sun to freshen it again. 

At the door he was received by the farmer's 
wife, a figure as square and deep as the porch 
itself, and led upstairs to a little room whose 
casement window, opening under the thatch, 
looked out across the fields to the two valleys. 
The passage outside was hung with wedding 
groups of the farmer's family and of the royal 
family in democratic neighbourliness, and in the 
room itself was one picture, so dark and dim that 
it looked as if it had been smoked. Peering close 
the young man could see a very large silver fish 
lying in the foreground of what might have been 
a landscape in the style of Poussin. The land- 
lady considered it to have been sufliciently de- 
scribed when she had said with pride that it was 
"a painting in oils." The young man was about 
to make a joke about smoked fish and fish in oil, 
but reflecting that the landlady would probably 

[6] 



THE TWO VALLEYS 

not understand it, he opened the window instead, 
and looked out across the fields to the two valleys. 
At this window, with its broad wooden seat 
cut in the thickness of the wall, he was content to 
spend his days. At night his mind still worked, 
troubled and overstrained, and he woke out of 
puzzled uneasy dreams of which he remembered 
only that he had been trying to get something to 
come right and always it went wrong; but his 
days were like long sweet sleep. Kneeling on 
that wooden seat and leaning from the window, 
where his outstretched hand could touch the 
thatch above and the living roof of the old yew 
porch below, he let his mind sink into idleness, 
luxuriously, as the tired body will sink into cool 
water. He sank to that depth where the mind is 
back again in its first childhood, content for 
hours with no more than a moving thing. So he 
was happy, watching the smoke of his pipe as it 
curled up into the thatch, or the top of an apple 
tree as it moved in the wind, or the rain as it fell 
through the still summer air, or the shadow of the 
tall box hedge at evening as it crept across the 
garden like a tide. And if there were neither 
rain nor shadow nor wind to watch, then he 
looked across the fields at the two valleys, and 
was content with their emptiness. 

[7] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

He had watched them for a long time before he 
even thought — so idle was he — of going any 
nearer to them. Then one day he walked across 
the fields and climbed the hill in which they lay, 
listening to the pleasant sound of the grass heads 
as they tapped on his boots, and looking at the 
simple and pure shape of the two valleys. After 
that he left his window under the thatch and 
spent his days lying on the odorous ages-old 
turf of the chalk which is more restful than down 
and all the "verdurous glooms." There, through 
half-closed eyes, he looked out, as he thought, at 
nothing, and thanked God for the emptiness of 
the two valleys, where none came and nothing 
had ever happened. 

To him, drowsing there, sleep and waking were 
almost the same, for each was a great peace, born 
of the strength and gentleness of that ancient turf 
on which he lay. Time was riot. Nothing in 
those valleys can ever have been other than it 
was. There was nothing — ^nothing as he looked 
round them, which could tell him whether he was 
in the present or the past, and he would wake 
(this was after he had listened to stories in the 
farm kitchen) wondering in what century he 
was, and look, still half asleep, for the deer steal- 
ers coming across the hill from the chase beyond, 

[8] 



THE TWO VALLEYS 

or listen for the sound of the mallets of the Nor- 
man stonemasons building the church in the 
little village across the hill. And once he won- 
dered if he heard, very faintly, the cries of men 
and women on the curving Down behind him as 
they watched the handfuls of the ashes of their 
dead laid on the dry chalk, and the black earthen 
pans placed over them and the great barrows, 
less ancient only than the hills, heaped above. 
So he dreamed in that empty place until one day 
he noticed in the turf a track, no broader than a 
cart wheel, and faintly white with chalk. He 
had lain close by it for a long time, not moving, 
and wondering what it could be, when suddenly 
a rabbit dashed down it from behind him and he 
saw its scut go over the valley's rim like a shoot- 
ing star. 

For the first time, he wakened to the living 
things in those two valleys. He would lie very 
still to watch the rabbits travelling up and down 
by those little roads that their feet had whitened, 
or playing tick down below, or coming out to sit 
in the sunlight as the shadow began to creep over 
the valley's rim. As his eyes opened, the empti- 
ness of the two valleys, for which he had blessed 
them, began to fill with living things. He 
watched each day for a flock of sheep that came 

[9] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

always by the same road — he had seen them 
before, unthinking as he had seen the flowers or 
the clouds — and drifted up through the valleys, 
silent as the blowing rain. He would listen now 
for the shepherd's voice coming across to him 
high and strange as the call of a bird, and watch 
for his dog that moved among the sheep like a 
bird's shadow on the turf. 

Each day he would see them stop in their 
wandering on the side of the long valley, and pour 
suddenly down into it, gathering eagerly round a 
small hut. Then they would drift away again, 
and when he went across to see why it was that 
they gathered there, he found drinking troughs 
round the hut and inside it a well. 

It was then that he saw the horseman. He too 
had his hour each day. He would come, riding 
slowly across the fields from the distant farm, 
and sit on a trough while the horse, tramping 
round and round, would pump the water up 
from the depths below the chalk. 

Last of all came the cows, and their hour was 
when the day began to turn, and the valleys 
seemed to ripen, growing golden and mellow in 
the sun ; and the rim of the rounded valley was 
marked with a foot of dark shadow, like the 
painting round the rim of a bowl. 

[10] 



THE TWO VALLEYS 

The cows would come in single file from the 
fields — each falling into place as the file went by 
in slow procession to the well. It was like a 
solemn ceremony at the close of day — the pro- 
cession of the evensong of the two valleys. So 
the noiseless coming and going of the day was 
ended, and the rounded valley began to fill with 
shadows. 

All this the young man watched and was 
fascinated, as a child watches the turn and return 
of the wheel of a watch. Each day it happened 
just the same. The creatures came and went, 
unheeding of time but at their appointed hours. 
They came also by their own paths that they had 
made themselves. Those empty valleys were 
more full of roads than the busiest of towns — 
roads made and kept by the continual passing of 
many feet. Their floors were all criss-crossed by 
the little white ways of the rabbits. Their sides 
were closely ribbed with hundreds of earth tracks 
studded with flints, which the feet of the sheep 
had beaten out of the turf. These tracks ran all 
round the valleys like the seats in an immense 
amphitheatre, so clearly and evenly were they 
made; and twisting leisurely across the fields was 
the broader highway of earth, worn out of the 
turf, by which the cows came to drink. 

[Ill 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Watching these roads, and wondering how 
much older they must be than the streets of the 
towns that he knew, watching them and the 
creatures that came by them, regular as the sun, 
in their uncrowded, unhurrying life, the young 
man forgot that desire for escape and for loneli- 
ness with which he had come, and was happy 
again with the present and the companionship 
of living things. 

On his last day he sat above the rounded valley 
until he saw the horseman appear across the 
fields. Then he walked down to the well and 
when the horseman came asked that he might be 
allowed to pump up the water that day. At this 
the horseman neither smiled nor looked surprised 
but nodded and sat his horse, while the young 
man laid his strength against the long pole. He 
pushed it round, slowly and laboriously, and did 
not stop until he heard the first of the water be- 
gin to flow into the troughs. Then, as the horse 
was fastened to the pole to finish the work, he 
climbed the valley's side, and taking one of the 
hundreds of little sheep paths, and treading care- 
fully in its narrow way, he went by it right round 
the two valleys and the curve of hillside which 
separated them, until he came to a rabbit track, 
and following this went up over the valley's rim 

[12] 



THE TWO VALLEYS 

to the place where he used to sit. All this he did 
as a man performing a ceremony, and then, 
feeling that by this act he had made himself a 
part of the valley's life, since he had shared for a 
moment in its toil, he went back by his accus- 
tomed way to the farmhouse, where his bag 
stood, ready packed, under the great porch of 
yew. 



[13] 



ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 

T^ VERY time that a man who loves the hills 
'—^ returns to them, he feels as if, for him, a 
miracle had been performed. Far away he has 
seen a strange look in the high clouds, and then, 
suddenly, he has known that the hills were there ; 
but just when that change came and how he first 
knew the hills from the clouds he can never be 
sure. In this way, for every traveller who returns 
to them, the hills are made afresh out of the sky. 
In whatever way he may come, there will always 
be that mysterious moment of their change, or, 
as it more truly seems to him, of their birth. 

But you do not come to the South Downs as 
you come to other hills. They do not grow out of 
the clouds, but rise up before you above the 
curve of the world. And yet, although they are 
always part of this earth, they are more distant, 
mysterious, and aloof than any of the other hills. 
They have no high peaks, nor fantastic shapes. 
They have nothing but their long unwavering 
line standing against the sky, like the unattain- 

[15] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

able horizon of the sea. It is this that makes 
them more remote than all the hills, and you 
draw near to them wondering always what it 
can be that lies beyond. They stand, as some- 
times the sea stands, like a great green wall of 
the Gods built to keep men from things too good 
for them to find, and the little chalk roads that 
go up them are like tall and slender ladders, from 
which a man, if he ever climbed them, would step 
straight into the sky. 

In another thing also the Downs are different 
from the hills. They do not change. For the 
unchanging hills do, indeed, change continually. 
You have seen them in the sunshine looking small 
and dusty and far away; and after rain, tall and 
black and very near. You have seen them tower- 
ing, awesome and beautiful, against a clear even- 
ing sky, and the next day dim with wrack and 
dwarfed by the great moving mountains of the 
clouds that roll above them. For the faces and 
the very stature of the hills change and change 
again with the changes of the sky. But the 
Downs do not change. There is something in 
their pure and beautiful shape which is stronger 
than any storms and than all the moods of the 
sky. Night and the clouds alike rest very gently 
on them. They have a sweetness and gravity of 

[16] 



ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 

their own which Nature herself cannot alter. 
The skies and the seas, the trees and the hills — 
all these she can make to reflect all her moods. 
But however her face may change above the 
Downs they remain always the same. They do 
indeed respond to those two needs which a man 
feels more and more strongly the older he grows. 
They are simple and they are sure. 

In his description of Egdon Moor Mr. Hardy 
speaks of a change in the human mind towards 
Nature. He believes that it grows darker in 
itself, and, seeking always for sympathy in Na- 
ture to its own moods, that it turns more and 
more towards what is most sombre and most 
bleak in her. He believes that in the end we shall 
have grown as indifferent to the groves and the 

valleys, to 

Daffodils 
With the green world they live in; and clear rills 
That for themselves a cooling covert make, 
'Gainst the hot season, the mid-forest brake 
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms, 

— as indifferent to these as were the earlier 
generations to the beauty of the hills. But that 
time will never come so long as there are men who 
try, in whatever way is given them, to praise the 
Sussex Downs. No man could love them and not 
keep in himself some sweetness and sanity and a 

[17] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

belief in gracious things. In them these antagon- 
isms, that elsewhere divide the world, have no 
existence. One cannot understand, when among 
them, why some men should love the valleys 
and some the hills, for on their heights the valleys 
and the hills meet. There are no sheltered and 
tended gardens in all England where the flowers 
bloom as they bloom on this open turf, fed by 
the south-west wind and the salt sea-mists. They 
are sown as close with the pale rock-roses as is 
the sky with stars, and their poppy fields are like 
flame and their great gorse slopes like golden light 
across the miles. And where these flowers bloom, 
and where the plough turns the earth and the 
corn is sown, and the road runs and the sheep 
feed, among all these things that belong to the 
quiet and sheltered places of the earth, there is 
also such a sense of spacious emptiness, inhab- 
ited only by the light and the wind, as one will 
not find on the highest hills, but only in the 
sky. 

Here too in that mysterious time between day 
and night other things meet also which elsewhere 
must always be divided. In that waning light 
one may wonder whether they are indeed of the 
earth, and do not belong also to the sea and the 
sky ; for all that is beautiful and serene in all three 

[18] 



ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 

seems to meet and be made permanent in the 
Downs, the expanse of the sea, and the gra- 
cious shapes of the earth, and the purity of the 
sky. 

I could believe that the Downs were made after 
the sky, in the early morning of the third day of 
the world, and are a little older than all the rest of 
the earth. When the waters were divided and 
the sky made between, a strange sea hung be- 
neath, and when the waters were gathered into 
one place that the dry land might appear, this 
sea was changed suddenly into land and its 
waves were caught and changed to earth before 
they could break. But even now it half belongs 
to the sky and the sea, and some day its great 
serene spaces will be lifted to the sky again, and 
its crested slopes of turf will break into water, 
and its white stones turn to foam. 

This sense of strange things meeting there, 
which everywhere else are kept apart, haunts all 
the verse that men have written about the 
Downs; but no one yet has found the words to 
say what it is. One poet tried when he said very 
bluntly of them that they were 

Half wild and wholly tame, 

and another when he wrote, — 

[19] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Together stand 

Tillage and pasture and dim fairyland, 

and yet another when he wrote, — 

They are a wonderland, where shapes well-known, 
Hayrick or homestead, bush or tree-top, seen 
Far off, take forms of faerie not their own. 

But no one has ever said what it really is, or 
indeed come nearer to saying it than a broad 
rough gesture, which is all that those words are. 
Indeed the wisest poet was he who did not 
attempt to say more than could be said in very 
plain and simple words, and who wrote, — 

And along the sky the line of the Downs 
So noble and so bare. 

For it is so that you remember them, as some- 
thing single, and complete, and very clear. It is 
because they have this simplicity, and their 
changeless look, and that far, remote line of their 
summit like the horizon against the sky, that 
they stand apart from all other hills and seem 
more steadfast than them all. Whatever else of 
beauty and mystery you have found in them, you 
see them always in your mind as you saw them 
when you first came to them, rising in their long 
green rampart from the weald, and shutting 
away behind them many things. For the mys- 

[20] 



ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 

tery of the hills as you come to them, watching 
them take birth from the clouds, is the mystery 
of what they are ; but the mystery of the Downs 
is the mystery of what they hide. 



[21] 



THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 

I MET the Sea Captain for the first time one 
* evening after a day of storm when the wind 
was blowing down the gap and out to sea. The 
water in the last grey reaches of the river was 
ruffled and broken between the wind and the 
incoming tide, and on the cliffs, on either side of 
the gap, you could hear, if you lay close in the 
turf, the cheerful song that the wind made, 
blowing through the fine grasses, and watch the 
seagulls as they rose from the crumbling cliff 
edge and were carried away like spindrift from 
a wave. 

The path to the top of the headland went 
upwards through a valley behind the crest of the 
cliffs, and was so smooth and so green that it was 
like a great hollow of water between two waves. 
It was empty except for a clump of bugloss turn- 
ing wine dark in the late summer, and the chalk 
stones, like patches of foam, all up the valley 
marking the path. 

A little way up I could see what looked like a 

[«3] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

much larger stone than any of the rest, but when 
I came to it I found a sheep lying on its back. It 
was lying very still, and its four legs were stick- 
ing straight up into the air so that it looked like a 
great wooden toy of a sheep, and no one would 
have been surprised to see a little wheel at the 
end of each of its feet. 

As I stood by it I saw a man coming down from 
the headland. He wore a big cloak, and I 
thought it must be the shepherd, although he 
carried no crook and he did not walk as the shep- 
herds do. I waited, and together we helped the 
sheep to its feet again. Then I looked at him. 
It was a shepherd's cloak that he had, and above 
it a sailor's sou'-wester. The two together, at 
first sight, gave him a comical air, but this one 
forgot when one knew him, and now I feel that 
this mixed dress, which he wore in all seasons, 
was exactly right for that strange, pathetic 
man. 

He told me the best way to help up sheep who 
have rolled on their backs, and talked of the 
staggers, and then he looked through the end of 
the valley out to sea. A steamer was on her way 
across to France, with her smoke rolling far ahead 
over the waters before that dancing north wind. 
Far beyond the smoke we could see a great sailing 

[24] 



THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 

ship going down Channel along the distant road 
of the horizon, and nearer at hand was a smaller 
ship making up the coast. The man looked at her 
for some time and said, in a changed, sharp voice, 
that she was carrying too much sail. 

I turned then to leave him, looking up at the 
great curve of turf above us which, in that amber- 
coloured evening light after the rain, had become 
a deeper and almost lucent green. 

"It's like a wave," I said. 

"It's like a wave," he repeated. "It hasn't 
started to break yet — but perhaps one day it 
will." 

These were our last words. He went down the 
valley, and I went up and over the headland, 
thinking of this odd man, and the sudden change 
in his voice when he spoke of the ship, and then 
the note that was almost fear, when he said of 
that great wave of turf that some day it might 
break. 

Everyone in the village called him the Sea 
Captain, and told me of his cleverness with 
animals and especially with sheep, which was well 
known, so that the shepherds themselves would 
seek his advice. But when I asked of his adven- 
tures at sea they said no more than that he was 
the Sea Captain. 

[25] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

I wondered what tales he would tell of the sea, 
but he told none. And yet the sea was always 
coming into his talk, and seemed never out of his 
mind. He told me no tales — and then, one night, 
as we went down towards the sea by a road, all 
roofed and dark with trees, that once upon a 
time the smugglers used, he told me of a storm 
when one of the hands fell from aloft, crashing 
with his face on the deck, and was picked up with 
his jaw broken, and hanging horribly loose on his 
throat. Perhaps it was the night and that dark 
road, and the sound of the sea on the shingle as 
we came near it, like mournful fingers raking 
among the stones for something that they had 
lost — perhaps it was these which gave to the 
tale a moving and terrible reality, as he described 
the look of horror in the man's eyes, and the 
awful noises that he made out of his hanging 
mouth, like a sheep in pain. That was his only 
tale, but it was like all his talk of the sea, through 
which there seemed to run, in spite of him, 
an odd current of fear. 

What the fear was I could not tell, but I came 
very soon to the conclusion that he must have 
left the sea for some fault of his own, and that 
this had made bitter all his memories. 

It was only when his talk of the sea mixed 

[26] 



THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 

with his talk of the land that it lost all fear. He 
talked as a lover of the Downs, with a love of the 
sea running through it all. He talked of them 
when the grey showers blew across them, and 
they themselves were like a rolling swell after a 
storm and of their great, grey untroubled empti- 
ness in the evening like a sea where no ship 
came, when one walked by the little white stones 
that marked the path, and looked out to the 
Channel for the friendly lights of the fishing fleet, 
gathered together like the lights of a town. 

He talked of the trees that filled the gap, 
shutting off his village from the sea, and of the 
trees round his home when he was a boy — he had 
come from inland ; and he would tell how he had 
listened to them at night, pretending that the 
wind in them was the sound of the sea, and won- 
dering when the call would come for him to go 
on deck. "And now when I hear it," he said, 
"I listen differently. I seem to hear it come 
howling over the awful empty sea, and then the 
wind falls a little and the emptiness all fills with 
the sound of the leaves." 

In this way he talked, this man whom some- 
thing at sea troubled, so that at times he seemed 
to fear it like a child ; but whether or not he woul d 
have been happy if he had left it altogether 

[27] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

going back to his own inland country, I could not 
be sure. 

One day the news came that he was dead, and 
that if I would go down to his cottage there were 
messages which he had left for me. I went, and 
found that he had been ill only two days. Before 
he died he had said that he left his sea books to 
me, begging that I would have '*Sea Captain" 
put on his tomb. 

There were only three or four books in his 
cottage, and they stood on a shelf in the kitchen 
with the candlesticks. I lifted them down, 
expecting to find his Nautical Almanack and 
Sailing Directions and his List of Lights and 
Tide Tables. Instead, to my surprise, I found 
that they were all volumes of Marryat, much 
mended and soiled, and their woodcuts col- 
oured roughly with chalk — ^the tales of the sea 
that boys read fifty years ago. And that was 
all. 

With the books in my hands, and a first under- 
standing of the mystery of the Sea Captain in 
my mind, I went up to the Vicarage. There I 
found a woman with the Vicar, *'the Captain's 
sister," he said, and added "not that he was a 
Captain at all." 

"Nor had ever been to sea" — ^the woman spoke 

[28] 



THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 

as if she were ashamed, "though he was always 
romancing about it." 

I put the books down on the table before her. 
She looked at them and went on. 

"And he was mad to go to sea until — '' she 
broke off, "and then he gave it up. But even 
then he said that he must be near the sea. I've 
hardly seen him for forty years. He might have 
had the farm — a good farm, and we're well to 
do" — she looked at us a little defiantly — "but he 
would come to the sea." 

I said nothing, for I was looking at the books 
and wondering. It might be in one of them, but 
I doubted it. 

"Did he ever tell you," I looked at the Vicar, 
"the tale of a storm when a man fell on deck and 
broke his jaw?" 

The Vicar shook his head, but the woman gave 
a start. 

"Broke his jaw.?" she said. 

"Yes," said I ; " so that it was hanging horribly 
down, and he was moaning like a sheep." 

"And he said that that happened on a 
ship.f*" She spoke almost with awe. "To think 
that he remembered it at all! He can't have 
been more than ten at the time. It was one of 
our farm hands. He fell off the roof of the 

[29] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

barn. To think that he said it happened on a 
ship!" 

"I am afraid it must have been deliberate 
deceit/' The Vicar was evidently pained — ^but 
then he had not heard the tale. 

I said nothing, remembering how the Sea 
Captain had told it on that dark road under the 
trees, to the sound of the mournful sea, as it 
crept and whispered among the stones. 

When the sister went away she took with her 
such things as the Sea Captain had left, but the 
books she said that I might keep. There were 
many things that she had not said, and that we 
had not liked to ask. Others had asked them, for 
the day after she had gone the village was full of 
vague tales. Yet she can have answered little or 
nothing. The tales were too vague. All we knew 
was that something had changed the Sea Captain 
when he was still a boy, turning his delight at the 
sea to fear, so that the sea had haunted him all his 
life, chaining him to her yet always repulsing 
him. 

After his burial the village was bitterly di- 
vided. Some would have had '*Sea Captain" 
put on his tombstone, as he had desired. The 
others held that to set up such a lie on holy 
ground would be blasphemy. It was useless to 

[30] 



THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 

argue that the very last man laid in that church- 
yard, though he had been a lazy drunkard, 
neglecting his wife and indifferent to his children, 
yet was described on his grave as a tender hus- 
band and devoted father. It was useless to 
argue, for the Vicar was on the side of those who 
were for the exact truth. 

But if the Sea Captain's spirit shall ever visit 
that place again, may he be satisfied to find, 
beneath his name and the date of his death. 

This soul hath been 
Alone, on a wide, wide sea. 



[31] 



THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 

ONE summer day, during the War, I walked 
through a Sussex village under the Downs, 
a village so undisturbed and serene that it 
seemed as if the hot breath of War can never 
have blown that way. I walked through it, 
counting the coloured cards in the cottage win- 
dows with the names of those who had gone to 
the War; and I wondered if there were any people 
left in it, for the place was so still and empty, and 
so many had gone. 

The wind was in the east, and, very faintly, it 
brought the sound of guns from the Flemish 
coast. There in the weald, the sound did not 
seem to come out of the air at all, but from 
beneath the Downs. It was like a murmur deep 
within the earth, as if the dead, lying under their 
barrows and the trenches of their ancient camps, 
had turned and muttered in their sleep. 

I followed the road through the village, and up 
the hill behind it, and sitting there at the top 
looked back across the quiet roofs to the Downs. 
' [33] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Then I saw that an old man had been dimbing 
the hill behind me. He stopped two yards away 
and bent down. A rabbit lay on the road close 
under the edge of the grass ; it had been killed 
and ripped open by a stoat. The old man picked 
it up and parting the grasses at the hedge roots 
slipped it in among them. He looked up and saw 
me watching him. 

"It'll be very well there," he said. "If I 
was a rabbit Fd rather lie there and feed that 
rose than at the bottom of one of their profitless 
sand-holes. But they will go to their holes if 
they can." 

He sat down near me and filled a pipe so that 
I had time to look at his face, a cheerful, strong 
face, well browned and wrinkled with the 
weather, a face, you could see, that took pleasure 
in feeling the wind and the rain. 

There's a woman down there," he went on 
(you could see her chimney if it wasn't for the 
church spire) who has just lost her son. I went in 
last night to say a word or two. 'Ah,' she said 
to me, *if only I had him here and could put him 
in the churchyard, where his father is, and know 
he was safe there, I'd be comforted. It's not 
knowing where he lies that's hard.' *What 
matter.^' said I; 'so long as there's good earth 

[34] 






THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 

round him he'll be easy. Fve seen life and death 
in these fields and woods enough years now to 
know as it don't matter very much where you lie 
so long as you're in good earth.' But there was 
no comfort in it to her. She would ha' been 
happier if she had seen him brought home to the 
churchyard. It's that that hurts them all." 

The old man puffed at his pipe for a while. 
"That's not my way of thinking," he said, and 
pointed down the hill. "There's my cottage, 
with the bent chimney and the honeysuckle 
round it. It's just flowering again. From the 
door you can see up this hill. The station is over 
the other side behind us. 

"It's three years and more now since my son 
went up this hill. He didn't say much, but we 
knew why he was going. When he came back he 
was a soldier. He came and went more than 
once. We never knew when he was coming. 
The last time he came from France. One night 
very late — it must ha' been long after ten — ^he 
knocked us up. There he was, loaded like a ped- 
lar, and as muddy as if he had just come from 
the plough. When he went away it made the 
sixth time that I had watched him up this hill. 
It's just where we are now that he would turn 
and wave at us." 

[35] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

The old man looked at me, and neither in his 
eyes or voice was any sadness. He spoke 
gravely; that was all. 

"His mother is like the rest/' he said; "she 
misses it that she didn't see him at the end lying 
on the bed where he was born. She misses the 
comfort of his grave to grieve over. But I like it 
better as it is. I feel the sudden end of it less. 
He just went away. 

" When he comes into the talk I don't hush my 
voice and stop. I talk of him just the same as 
before, and tell the tales that he used to tell when 
he came home, and laugh over them. 

" It shocks some of them. They think I've no 
heart because they don't see me grieve. But 
there's no comfort to me in grieving, as there is 
to some. He just went away as he had gone 
before, and I like to think that he can still come 
back. 

"The Vicar says I should be comforted, re- 
membering that he did his duty and that now 
he's in heaven. But / say that I'd rather think 
that he's still somewhere on earth, and that one 
day yet he'll come walking over this hill again." 

The old man looked at me and smiled. Then 
he got to his feet, and I with him ; and we walked 
together just across the crest of the hill. Away 

[36] 



THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 

below it the white smoke of a train was moving 
above the hedges, and when it stopped I could 
see the red station among the trees. We watched 
long after the train had gone, for we could see the 
little dark figures of people come out of the sta- 
tion and move along a few yards of white road 
before the hedges hid them. We watched until 
they had all disappeared, until it was certain 
that there were no more to come. Then, very 
slowly, the old man knocked out his pipe in the 
palm of his hand, and turning, went back down 
the hill. 



[37] 



SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 

I heard a mess of merry Shepherds Sing 
A joyful song full of sweet delight. 

SHEPHERDS changed when they laid aside 
their pipes. Neither Theocritus nor the 
writers of the Mediaeval and Elizabethan Carols 
would have understood Professor Jacks's Mad 
Shepherds. To them the shepherds were the 
merriest of men, but to us, now that they have 
ceased to sing, they are of all men the most 
mysterious. We wonder how they fill their 
silences. As they stand along the edges of the 
hills, bent a little over their crooks, they are like 
great solitary birds. Nor do they even walk 
like other men. They walk as if they were meant 
always to be still, like statues just come to life 
and moving for the first time their joints of stone, 
or like trees feeling their way with their great 
roots. Do they wait like animals in vacant con- 
tent.? Or do they dream? Of this world, at 
least, they know things that we cannot. Per- 
haps they are the richer men for having now no 

[39] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

pipes to play, and for standing in silence all day 
on the hills. 

But this shepherd, had he lived in the piping 
times, had piped as merrily as any of them. 

He had on him his tabard and his hat, 
His tar box, his pipe and his flagat; 
His name was called jolly, jolly Wat. 

He too, had he lived in other times, had been a 
jolly, jolly Wat. 

He was a small man and, although it was a 
warm summer day, he wore a massive overcoat 
that almost touched the ground. He stooped a 
little, and it seemed as if his shoulders bent 
beneath its weight. He had a plain, gentle, and 
wooden face that did not change. But his eyes, 
which were a very pale clear blue, were alive as 
he talked, and by them one knew when he was 
laughing. He had also two small tobacco pipes, 
— very small for a man to smoke in the open 
air. They were both old and black, one of clay 
and one of briar, and he filled and smoked them 
alternately. 

He talked like other men, boasting in a gentle 
and charming way of his possessions and the 
things that he did. He talked of his great coat 
which he had bought marvellously cheap and 

[40] 



SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 

which no rain could penetrate. He told us how 
he had painted it with rubber and, pegging it out 
one night, had filled it with water; yet in the 
morning it was dry as a rush beneath. He talked 
of his employers, telling us how they were wrong 
about the sheep and he was right, and of the dogs 
he had bred and the marvellous things that they 
did, and of his sheep, and an illness that they had 
had, wasting away, as he said, like butter against 
the sun. So he talked with his gentle wooden 
face, in the same way that other men talk of 
themselves when they love their work, except 
that he spoke without vain glory and without 
bitterness even towards his employers and their 
mistakes. In all he said there was the sweetness 
of the open air. He talked ; but we had not yet 
touched on the thing that piped in his soul. 

We made ready to leave him, pointing out our 
way along the Downs to a distant hill where 
stood a solitary and withered thorn which was 
called "the Scrag.'' In reply he asked us (filling 
this time the briar) if we knew Cunning Dick's 
hole, which, not long since, had been discovered 
in the side of the hill with the table and chair still 
in it that Dick had used. And when we asked 
him who was Dick his eyes showed his surprise, 
and he answered that it was Dick Turpin, who 

l4i] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

had worked in those parts. Then he turned and 
pointed across to the next ridge of the Downs 
where once the main road had run along the 
summit — a road still broad and level but now 
green with turf. He pointed to a wood, and, 
speaking as a man speaks who had made great 
discoveries, he said that he knew, over there in 
that wood, of another of Cunning Dick's holes. 
The hole itself he had never been able to find, 
but his brother one day had seen, stuck in the 
trunk of a tree, the staple to which Dick must 
have tied his horse; and he himself had drawn 
that staple out. He had it still. And then . . . 
'"I've read two hundred of Cunning Dick's 
books," he said. 

We had been growing a little weary of his 
gentle, ambling garrulity, but at this we stopped. 
We had come suddenly on a great belief, and we 
looked at him in surprise and even in reverence. 
He talked on of Dick's adventures, the eyes, in 
his kindly wooden face, full of excitement, and as 
he talked we could see him as he must often be, 
sitting by some cottage fire in winter evenings, 
and reading those little paper-bound books, each 
with its " two-penny coloured " cover of a high- 
wayman — reading them with the simple, com- 
plete faith of a child. 

[42] 



SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 

It was not in Dick and his adventures that we 
were interested, but in this romantic shepherd. 
He was touched with that splendid madness 
which compels some men to turn their fellows 
into gods. Had he lived in a town and among 
books instead of with his sheep in the sweet, sane 
air of the Downs, he might have been one of those 
strange conspirators who find the hidden hand of 
Bacon in every Elizabethan writer, and turn the 
joyous, full-hearted literature of all that age into 
a vast inhuman mystery. Instead he believed, 
with a faith which could harm none, that every- 
thing which he had read of Dick Turpin had been 
written with Dick's own hand. 

He had passed the age at which every reader 
of fairy tales and adventure asks the question 
which proclaims him mortal, doomed to doubt 
and change — the question, "Did it really hap- 
pen?" He had passed it with his faith un- 
dimmed. He had missed the first turning point 
of mortal men, and gone on by his own road. 

He knew that Dick was dead. He knew that 
he would never see him come galloping across 
the Downs, nor did he peer in at his Cunning 
Hole expecting to find him at his table. Yet he 
had, not knowing it, made Dick immortal. 
Another hundred books of Dick's adventures 

[43l 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

may yet be written, and he will receive them all, 
in pure and simple faith, as from Dick's own 
hand. He may never find that Cunning Hole 
for which he seeks, but there are great discover- 
ies still for him to make. For surely some day 
the " penny dreadful " will grow weary of modern 
times and the discovery of crime, and the adora- 
tion of great detectives. It will return again to 
the past, to the highroad and horsemen, to 
genial rogues and picaresque romance. Then 
will he be happy. 

He plays no pipe on the Downs, and sings no 
songs, but he is of the company of Merry Shep- 
herds. For as he goes his slow way behind his 
sheep, sweeping the grass heads with his coat, 
or stands and looks across the valley at the wood 
where the Cunning Hole lies hid, what a great 
figure of a horseman gallops always down the 
romantic high-road of his soul. 



[44] 



GREAT ROADS 

OF all the things that man has ever made the 
roads are the greatest of his works of un- 
conscious art. You cannot imagine the most 
contemptible of aesthetes having a road made 
that through his window he might admire the 
grace with which it turned a corner; and you 
may be sure of this, that if he did it would be a 
vain thing, and that the road, since it was not 
made to travel by, would not be worth looking 
at. Men have never made a road except for the 
good reason that they wanted very much to reach 
some place; and in doing it they have always 
shown themselves indifferent to beautiful things. 
They break the hills; they ruin the streams. 
They go on their way caring for nothing but their 
intent to arrive, and yet, not knowing what they 
do, they make the roads also beautiful and 
mysterious, with a beauty and mystery which 
endure long after their purpose has been fulfilled, 
and which become a part of the very magic of 
the earth. 

[45J 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Wherever the great roads pass they bring 
three noble things. They bring memory. When 
the Romans built a road for many miles along 
that high and level summit which is still called 
High Street, they did it only because they 
thought that so they could most easily take their 
legions from Windermere to Penrith. That road 
was long since overgrown with the old turf of the 
hills, and we go northwards now by other ways. 
But beneath the turf the road remains, a road 
travelling no longer to Penrith but back into the 
years. It serves no purpose now, but it remains, 
ennobling the hills. To them the changing and 
returning seasons cannot bring forgetfulness. 
There is this road within their turf keeping the 
past alive. For this also one can say of the roads 
that cannot be said of any other of the works of 
men. They may be forgotten but, so long as they 
are remembered, they cannot altogether die. 
Cities that have fallen into ruins are more deso- 
late than emptiness. The flowers and the grasses 
have come up like hands out of the earth to draw 
them back to it. No one will ever live in them 
again. Imagination itself can hardly rebuild 
them, or believe that men ever called them home. 
But where roads have been — even though they 
are covered with the turf, and the wild things 

[46] 



GREAT ROADS 

have returned to live in them — there men can 
still walk. 

The second good thing that the great roads 
bring is this, that they give to all the country 
which they cross an emphasis and firmness to 
whatever is beautiful in its shape. They make 
the plains more level ; they mark, so that the eye 
can see it more clearly, the beautiful dip and 
wave of the land at the foot of the hills; they 
make magnificent the great curve of a hillside. 
As they can ennoble an empty place with mem- 
ory so also can they give grandeur to its very 
shape. It is so with those great roads of North- 
ern France that go rising and falling, rising and 
falling, across the arches of the Downs. Where 
those unswerving roads touch that smoothly 
rolling country with its even and gentle curves, 
it is suddenly changed. They seem to increase 
its very stature, to exalt it. 

Last of all the great roads bring romance. Not 
the eye only but the mind travels by them, 
imagining many things. Never does it go so far 
into the distant mists as when it follows the way 
of the white roads. This is their final paradox 
and mystery. One knows that it is by following 
them and not by turning aside that one will reach 
the undiscovered places. 

[47] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

What it is that gives to certain roads this 
enchantment no one can tell. Some have it and 
some have it not, and some may have it in one 
place and not another, and some may have it 
only at certain times. One cannot explain it. 
You can only say that of such a road you know 
at once that it will take you to some place where 
you wish very much to be. By this you know 
these roads, and it is the only thing really worth 
having in a road, and these are the only roads 
worth travelling by. 

No one has yet written a book about the influ- 
ence of the roads on the characters of the na- 
tions who make them, or, if you prefer it, about 
the way in which the characters of nations are 
made clear by their roads. One could write the 
book from either starting point, and from each it 
would be true. For we show what we are by 
what we make, and the things once made, com- 
pleted and not to be changed, are a perpetual 
influence upon us. The history of Europe could 
be told in such a book; and it would have a very 
beautiful chapter entitled "The Part Played by 
Hedges in the Development of the English 
Character." 

The whole difference between the English and 
French peoples is in their roads. Each started 

[48] 



GREAT ROADS 

with the roads that the Romans left them, and 
France still travels by those roads; but in Eng- 
land men now search for them under the turf of 
the Downs and trace across the fields the way 
that they must have taken. The faith of the 
French mind in reason; its courage in following 
ideas direct to their conclusion; its economy; its 
love of light, and of good proportion, and of the 
classic in beauty — all these things are expressed 
by those great roads laid like a sword across the 
country, unswerving, unhedged, open to the sun, 
with their poplars kept spare and lean by the 
winds. All noble things the French roads have 
but one — they are without enchantment. They 
are too straight and too confident. They lead 
only to that place whose name is on the map. 

All that the French roads are the English 
roads are not. They wander. They go, so many 
of them, between great flowering, wasteful, 
beautiful hedges; and the trees rise out of the 
hedges, stretching magnificent arms from that 
pleasant shelter in which they live, massive and 
luxuriant, as if all the richness of the earth were 
only to give them stature and beauty. Those 
roadside trees, and the undipped hedges full of 
birds, and the broad grass banks, and the ditches 
that are wayside gardens of wild flowers, what 
^ [49] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

else could speak more clearly than they of the 
easy, wasteful, jolly contentment of the English? 
Seeing these roads any foreigner might say that 
indeed they could belong only to the people who 
use so much that word which he cannot trans- 
late — "comfortable." Walking by them also as 
they wind and wander, seeming not to know 
what way they will go, yet all the time following 
the curves and slopes of the earth, until in some 
mysterious easy way of their own they do at 
last reach the place — ^walking by them so, he 
might also come to understand that thing of 
which he is most impatient, suspicious and re- 
sentful, that strange sense by which, blundering 
on without any light of reason, the English, in 
the end, arrive. 

Above all, if he followed the English roads, by 
wayside hedge and elm and oak and beech, by all 
their flowering, comfortable, pleasant windings, 
until suddenly they lifted him out and up to the 
open turf of moor or hill or Down, not like those 
French roads pointing straight as a sign-post to 
the next town, but still wandering — as if they 
searched for something — over the hills and into 
the sky — then at last perhaps he would under- 
stand the final and greatest puzzle of the English: 
why it is that out of this people, not caring much 

[50] 



GREAT ROADS 

for thought, loving ease and comfort, out of this 
people, as he thinks them, of over-prosperous 
tradesmen, so many poets have come and have 
travelled on to such strange cities and lands and 
fairy places, as no straight road has ever reached. 
These things and many more a man might 
learn from the great roads, but they stand also as 
a symbol of something greater even than the soul 
of a people. They are the splendid symbol of all 
noble art, the symbol of the truth that men only 
achieve beautiful and enduring works when they 
are not concerned alone with the beauty of what 
they do, but are intent also on reaching some- 
thing, even though it is no more than an under- 
standing of what is in their own minds. 



[51] 



THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 

TIE was killed by a wandering bullet when 
* '■' working on a road behind the lines, and 
these are passages from some of his letters. He 
wrote a great deal, for though he had good com- 
rades in his Labour Battalion, there were none 
to whom he could talk very much, and so he was 
always writing for the comfort and pleasure of his 
own mind. It left him content in the monotony 
of a labour that had none of the fierce moments 
of a soldier's life, though it brought him a 
soldier's death. 

His letters were written in all sorts of odd 
places, whenever the fancy took him and he had 
five minutes leisure, by the light of a candle 
stump as he sprawled on the floor of his billet, 
or as he lay at the road-side resting; and he spoke 
of them always as his "raw stuff," that some day 
he would use. They are full of cheerful talk 
about all the books that he would write after the 
war, but most of all about his book on roads. 
And now that wandering bullet has brought him 

[53] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

and them to the dust, and there remains nothing 
of it all but a grave in France and a box full of 
*'raw stuff'' and eager hope. 



"I seem now to have been busy all my life 
with roads. There was a bit of road that I used 
to love when I was a boy. It was across the 
valley from my home. One end of it rose out of 
the woods, and the other went over the edge of 
the hill. I used to play with that bit of road ; I 
used to play at sending people up and down it. 
Once you sent them over you never knew just 
how they would come back, or what they would 
bring. It was this that made it a fine game, a 
game of unending fancies. I often think of it as 
I bend over these roads. 

"And I often remember how the news of the 
war first came to me. I was in the north of 
England that August, tramping along the crest 
of the hills that are still called High Street, after 
the road which the Romans built there. In the 
late twilight I came down to an inn at the head 
of a lake. I had been thinking of the Roman 
legionaries who once upon a time went that way, 
and feeling the utter freedom and peace of it all. 
For I was alone all day with the turf and the wind 

[54] 



THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 

and the white sign-posts, that up there on the top 
of the hills seemed to point to no places on earth 
but to some distant places of the sky. In the inn 
I picked up a paper two days old and read the 
declaration of war. 

''There was destiny in it when they made me a 
roadmaker. 



" When I am cheerful I dream of writing the 
greatest book on roads that was ever written. 
For I have done more than tramp the roads and 
love them. I have worked on them and ached 
for them. I shall go to Rome where all the great 
roads start; and I shall write of it all in a house 
that I see (though it is still unbuilt) just under 
the edge of the North Downs where the oldest 
road in England runs. That is how I dream 
when I am cheerful ; and when I am sad I think 
that I shall die on one of these roads and drop 
into a shell hole. 



*'We work too hard in the open air to dream at 
night. When I lie down I tumble straight into 
deep sleep. But sometimes I have a half dream 
in the mornings, before I am fully awake. It is 

[55] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

a dream always of the road that, at the moment, 
we are making across this shell-broken, pitiful 
country; but always as I go along it it becomes 
that white road over the hill that I knew when I 
was a boy. I know that they are the same roads 
but I never see where they join. There is always 
a bit of dead ground between them, and I always 
wake before I come to it. But beyond I see the 
old road very clear, going over the hill. 



"I had rather a success with the battalion the 
other night. We were back in camp. It had 
been a day of continual rain, awful to work in, 
and there had been fairly heavy shelling that had 
cut up our work. We were sodden and discon- 
tented and cursed roads and roadmaking and 
prayed to be in the trenches, and sneered at our- 
selves because we were not real soldiers. It was 
then that I broke in and told them of the Roman 
roads, and what awful labour they were to make, 
built in stone across the hills, and how those 
roads made the Empire. I talked of that great 
old road under the trees above Mickleham that 
crosses Epsom Downs by the racecourse (they 
all knew that) and I talked of that road which 
you can still see at Blackstone Edge, with the 

[56] 



THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 

heavy flags as the Romans laid them. And I had 
them Hstening. 

"Then a man who had worked on the Uganda 
Railway joined in, and a navvy who had laid 
wood pavements in London, and another man 
who was working, when the war came, on the new 
road by the Ouse down to the sea. Before we 
had done talking we all knew that roadmaking 
was the finest work in the world. 

*' I shall never smell the heavy smell of damp 
clothes again without thinking of that scene ; and 
how the man from East Africa spoke, in little 
unexpected flashes, of the wonder of his work; 
and how the navvy from London laid down the 
law of roads, and, whatever you might say of 
Roman stone, would not allow that any road 
was a real road unless it were built of wood. 



" I often think of what de Musset wrote, that 
if a man despaired of being a poet he should 
shoulder his pack and march in the ranks. It is 
when we march that I do all my thinking. With 
this perpetual work in the open, if I sit down to 
think I fall asleep ; and there is no thinking as we 
work. Then the body takes possession of the 
mind. Sometimes a line of a song, or the last 

[57] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

sentence I thought before we took up tools, will 
occupy it all the day. It can go no further. But 
when we are marching then it can roam. While 
my body drones on in the mud below, it travels 
on the poplar tops. I have never known it so 
free. I have never before so dreamed and 
planned, and loved the distant and delightful 
things as now in the prison-house of this con- 
centrated, unresting labour of war." 



When the roadmaker was shot the last of his 
letters was still in his pocket. 

" I had that dream of the two roads again the 
other night, but it was different. While always 
before I have looked forward to the old road from 
the road that we were making, this time I was on 
that old road and going up to the edge of the hill. 
I was nearly at the top when I stopped to look 
back. But the ground where the two joined was 
still hidden. I must have crossed it before the 
dream began. I wonder what had happened 
there." 



[58] 



WARRIOR TREES 

OF the past of the Downs what remains? 
There was the time when men lived in their 
freedom and sweetness, high above the oak for- 
ests and the marshes, the wolf packs and the 
fevers of the weald ; when they cut their axes and 
their arrowheads from the flints of Cissbury, and 
fought their wars on that open turf. There was 
the time when Vespasian led the 2nd Legion 
from London to conquer southern England; 
when the legionaries dug their trenches, and 
built their palisades, and lit their camp fires all 
along the summit of the Downs, and made the 
perilous journeys for water into the weald in the 
shelter of the deep, trenched paths. There was 
the time when Ella sailed in from Germany with 
his three ships and his sons, and through many 
years fought for the Downs. But of all those 
years, and of those little wars, which were the 
birth struggles of England, what remains ? The 
morning mists still blow in from the sea, as when 
they came to fill the earliest dew-ponds and to 

[59] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

make the shivering Roman sentry long for Pro- 
vence or the warm Italian plains, but time and 
the turf have rounded the trenches and smoothed 
the great camps as tides wash out sand castles. 
The Downs still remain, immense and tranquil 
and free, as they were before men came. 

Only the trees of the Downs seem to be 
troubled by that distant past. There is a 
strangeness in them as if the spirit of the ancient 
soldiers of the Downs, Briton and Roman and 
Saxon, were still an influence deep below the turf 
that feeds their roots. The trees alone of all the 
things of the Downs seem to speak of remem- 
bered wars. I could believe that the wandering 
men who drove their flocks across the Downs, 
and watched in the morning the marsh fogs of 
the weald, and listened at night for the bark of 
the wolves, and the men who climbed in the 
darkness from the shelter of the forests and 
prowled round the Roman camps, still nourish 
with their spirits those stunted thorns that 
stand, forlorn and twisted, on the Downs. They . 
seem to belong to an earlier, more savage race 
than the great beeches, whose roots, it may be, 
have found the graves of the legionaries. 

Wherever the beeches grow on the slopes of 
the Downs they are changed. They seem to have 

[60] 



WARRIOR TREES 

lost the deep-rooted steadfast content of the 
trees of the weald and to have gathered, waiting 
for some order to come. They fill the great 
valleys like armies, in close ranks, expectant, 
and when the wind moves among them it might 
be the first step of a sudden advance. In all the 
combes along the Downs between Adur and 
Arun are little companies of trees that are gath- 
ered close together and seem to press in against 
the Downs — as the British warriors must once 
have crouched below the Roman camps, and 
here and there, halfway up the slopes, solitary 
trees seem to wait until the time shall come to 
take the next step upwards. 

Ever5rwhere among the trees is this strange 
expectancy, as if some day an enchantment will 
be broken, and their roots be freed, and they 
themselves be turned again into armed men who 
will sweep upwards and over the great green 
rampart which lies above, and once more look 
southwards to the sea. 

Along that rampart also where once the sen- 
tries watched, it is the trees which seem to have 
kept the memory of the trenched and palisaded 
camps. I do not think of vigilance and war when 
I look at the smoothed out trenches of Ditchling 
or even the deeper earthworks of Wolstonbury, 

[61] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

but at those strange and solitary circles of 
beeches, in which the trees grow so close together 
that only a flicker of light shows through their 
branches. Far away across the Downs you see 
these camps of trees, standing high and lonely 
and self-sufficient in the emptiness of the Downs. 
It is only when you come near them that you see 
them to be trees. In the distance they are grey 
and smooth as stone. They stand like fortress 
rocks. The winds cannot stir them. 

When the enchantment is lifted, it will be they, 
and not the old camps of turf, which will turn to 
palisades, and glitter with the spear heads and 
the helmets and the strong short swords of the 
waiting legionaries. So do the trees seem still to 
keep the memory of wars ten centuries old, and 
to draw up from the ancient graves the spirit of 
buried soldiers. I wonder if at night, when the 
sheep are gathered into their folds and men have 
gone back to the weald, all these trees — the great 
circles of beeches like grey forts, and the solitary 
thorns, and the little hangars waiting in shelter 
to climb the Downs — become the toys of the 
children of the gods, and if this can be their great 
nursery, where, in the hours when men and the 
sheep and the flowers are asleep, they come to 
play at soldiers ? 

[62] 



THE ROAD TO DIDLING 

TN a manner of speaking I am now, and always 
*- shall be, on that road. Just as here and 
there, sometimes on this road sometimes on that, 
on old turf tracks and between the houses of dark 
and busy streets, one remembers that here, under 
one's feet, is a road to a Roman town, so in un- 
expected places do I wonder if this, on which I 
walk, may not be part of the road to Didling. 
All roads do not lead to Didling as they lead to 
Rome, but for three minutes of one summer 
evening we were on a road which went to that 
place and nowhere else. 

No one had ever spoken of it to us; but one 
morning, stopping in the rain by a chalk quarry, 
halfway up the Downs, we found that name on 
the map. The name is still there. It is not an 
elfin name which we have never been able to find 
again, which came on that one morning to lead 
us astray, either for our sorrow or our happiness. 
The name is there, and the place, as I believe, is 
there, a solid English place of stone and flint, red 

[63] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

tiles and brown thatch. It lies — but what does 
it matter where it lies? Anyone can find it for 
himself on the map. 

There and then, standing by the quarry 
against a hazel bush while the wind shook the 
rain drops in heavy showers off the full-leaved 
beech trees, we resolved to set out for Didling. 
We climbed the steep chalk path, and at the 
summit turned westwards by the turf road. The 
clouds lay close above us, in even and dark lines, 
like enormous black rafters across the sky. With 
those clouds above and the tall beech woods on 
either side, through whose branches we could see, 
as through little windows, far down into the 
weald, it was as if we were walking all this day 
in a great dark room. It was a room full of the 
wind and the rain, and from it we looked out 
always at a distant, fairy world. For from under 
the low clouds we could see, many miles distant, 
hills where the sun shone. 

So we tramped towards Didling. Who had not 
been enchanted, opening his map, to have come 
suddenly on such a name; to have seen it, for the 
first time, when he was already on the road; to 
have found that it was not many miles away? 
Didling filled our day. We talked of it. We 
wondered what manner of place it was. We 

[64] 



THE ROAD TO DIDLING 

joked about it. We made such rhymes to it as 
there were to make, and all day long we drew 
nearer to it. There was in that name something 
at once so comical and so romantic, so friendly 
and so remote, so homelike and yet so elfin, that 
we could not tire of it. We had never heard of 
Didling before. But three hours since we should 
have laughed if anyone had spoken of it, saying, 
"There is no such place, but if there were, what 
a strange place it must be," — and now we should 
reach it by tea time. 

The rain came and went. We bent to its fierce- 
ness, and then raised our heads to watch its 
silver squadrons go sweeping across half a 
county. The wind dried us as soon as the rain 
had passed. Far away, now here now there, we 
saw the sunlight mingling with the rain, but we 
walked always under the dark low rafters of the 
clouds; and at every step we came nearer to 
Didling that waited to welcome us and to laugh 
with us. 

At midday we sat down to eat on a fallen tree 
where a road, soft with last year's leaves and 
black with rain, went steeply down through the 
woods. And as we ate we heard from that road 
a voice singing, loudly and triumphantly. It 
sang "On the road to Didling," and then linger- 
^ [65] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

ingly and softly, as if not willing to leave it, the 
voice repeated the name "Did-el-ling," and then 
it took up the song again, 

*'The old turf road to Didling" 

and again, and in the same fond way, "Did-el- 
ling," 

*' Sometimes you'll spy 
Elves dancing by 
To the sound of fiddlers fiddling, fiddling, fiddling ..." 

But how many times the voice repeated the word 
we could not say, for it fell very low and there 
was, to us, a long silence before it took up the 
song again, loudly, but further away than before, 

"On the road to Didling, 

Didling, 
The old turf road to Didling, 

Didling 
If you hold your ear. 
Perhaps you'll hear 
Those fairy fiddlers, fiddling, fiddling." 

At that moment the wind suddenly caught the 
wet tree above us and shook it fiercely, and when 
it had passed the voice had gone. If there was 
more to that song we could not hear it, though we 
listened for a long time. 

Then we went on our way trying to sing the 

[66] 



THE ROAD TO DIDLING 

song for ourselves; but we could not sing it. It 
was one of those tunes which run very clearly in 
the head, but as soon as the voice attempts to 
catch them they dart away. We pursued it so for 
nearly two miles of our road ; but we could not 
sing it. So we tried no more. We stayed con- 
tent with the tune running in our heads, not like 
a song that one has sung once and cannot forget, 
but gently, evenly, delightfully like a rippling 
stream. 

So, too, with the words, they were clear in my 
mind until I tried to write them down, and then 
I knew that I had not got them right. All I can 
say is that as the man sang them they were, in 
some way that I cannot discover, both comical 
and beautiful. 

Three hours later we turned aside from the 
turf road and went down by a steep chalk track 
into the weald. At once everything was very 
still. A great buttress of the Downs, sheltering 
in its curve a field of corn, held off the wind, and 
between tall hedges, odorous, rain-laden and 
covered with Travellers' Joy, we came to a road. 
To the left it went to villages that do not matter. 
To the right it went to Didling. Across the 
fields we could already see hay-ricks and the 
steep roof of a barn all golden with lichen. 

[67] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Above us stood the beautiful shape of the Downs, 
serene and benign as the figure of an angel. We 
turned to the right, but before we had gone many 
yards we stopped again to consider our way. 
The road was clear, but out in the weald, where 
evening already began to stoop and settle gently 
over the fields, was a station, and the last train 
of the day. By which road should we be sure to 
catch it.^ At any other time this had been a 
trivial choice, but now with Didling already 
rising among the fields to welcome us, we stood 
there very solemnly looking at our watches. 
Their hands were against us, and we turned 
about. We turned feeling that there was some- 
thing more than time which made us take the 
other road. We were meant not to enter Didling, 
though we had travelled towards it the whole 
day, though we had talked of it until already 
we seemed to know it like our own home. 

We took the other road and, looking back, we 
could see only the gentle shape of the Downs 
rising above the fields. We had passed Didling 
by. We had not trod its street — ^for it could have 
had but one, — nor looked in at its windows, nor 
knocked on its doors. We had seen only that one 
golden roof in the distance, and we had turned 
aside. Yet we went on our way satisfied, and 

[68] 



THE ROAD TO DIDLING 

even exalted. It was as if we had indeed entered 
Didling and found it as lovely and as comical as 
we had desired. 

We went on by the darkening road, and now in 
our content we sang aloud nearly all the way; 
but it was no longer the elfin, unseizable Song of 
Didling that we tried to sing. We sang of simple 
and earthly things. About this time, we knew, 
far away, steak and onions were beginning to 
prepare for our supper, and so we sang of these. 
We sang of them to most of the tunes that we 
knew, and they seemed to us, in that splendid 
mood, to go equally well with them all — ^with 
tunes of comic songs and of anthems, of marching 
songs and of love songs. We had never thought 
before of singing of such things, nor had we ever 
before sung so carelessly, so untiringly or en- 
joyed so much to be singing. Didling was behind 
us. We had renounced it, but its influence went 
with us making us happy; and now we doubly 
possess that comical, romantic place — as a place 
which we have found to be all that we desired, 
and as a place which, some day, we shall see for 
the first time. 



[69] 



WINTER WOODS 

TT is the winter woods that are haunted. Why 
* look for fairies in the spring, when the buds 
are green, when the primroses first lighten the 
long winter darkness and the woods are too full 
of the beauty of this world for the mind to pass 
beyond it ? If one would find them it must be 
behind the burnt and shrivelled tatters of the 
beech leaves that lie on the dark boughs of De- 
cember. In the woods of spring what more 
would one hope or wish to find than the buds and 
flowers of this good life beginning? But the un- 
changing winter woods, that are dead to this 
world, are most like an entrance to some world 
beyond. In their silence the mind travels on- 
ward, searching for strange places, with eyes that 
look and ears that listen for the enchantments of 
another world. It is then, between the dead 
brown leaves, that one might at any moment see 
the holly-berry red of fairy caps, or look into 
fairy faces through the cloudy windows of the 
white ice at the edge of the dark pools. 

[71] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

The silence of the winter woods is not the 
silence of death, as is commonly said, but the 
silence of suspense. They are not woods where 
everything has happened but where anything 
might happen; and there is this great difference 
between them and the woods of summer, that 
the woods of summer are loveliest when you go 
into them and the woods of winter when you 
pass them by — the woods of summer as you lie 
in their heart and watch the wind shake down 
the sunlight out of their rustling leaves, the 
woods of winter as you march towards them 
looking at that dark and turreted wall which 
they make against the sky. 

These winter woods are not the frosted woods 
which are as gay and beautiful as the woods of 
spring, so that the heart sings in them though 
they are silent, but the black woods of the grey 
time, the woods that throw no shadows. None 
could walk towards them without the hope of 
finding something strange and beautiful within. 
They are of greater stature than the woods of 
spring. The smallest copse has the mystery 
and grandeur of a forest, and a belt of trees 
against the low winter light is like a majestic 
entrance to the sky. They are not trees grow- 
ing from the earth, but pillars holding up the 

[72] 



WINTER WOODS 

sky. Their tops touch its light. They stand like 
stone. 

Somewhere in the heart of these winter woods 
are all the castles of romance, beyond that dark 
mist of the close and naked twigs which hides 
them more securely than all the heavy greenery 
of summer. It must have been in a winter wood, 
a wood that never budded nor blossomed, 
whose black branches grew closer and closer, and 
whose twigs wove between them a darker and 
darker mist, that the Princess slept for a hundred 
years. All round that enchanted wood were 
single fir trees, raven black, as fir trees are in the 
grey of winter afternoons, like sentinel towers on 
the edge of mystery, and from its depths rose 
the peaks of solitary trees standing like pin- 
nacles of rock against a low yellow sky which did 
not change. Within it, at its very heart was a 
wood of larches, most mysterious of all the trees, 
for in winter they are not a wood at all until you 
touch them, but a grey cloud. Beyond them was 
a great brown wall of beech leaves, and within 
that wall the sleeping palace lay, a palace built 
of wood which through those hundred years of 
sleep had slowly turned to trees again; but since 
they too sleep in that long winter enchantment, 
they put forth no green leaves but only dark 

[73] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

twigs. Little by little the tall windows drew 
across themselves a lattice of their own branches, 
and the wood carving of the rooms turned very 
slowly into twisted tree stems, and the fading 
gold upon them to withered leaves. So the wood 
stood round the sleeping Princess for a hundred 
years, black when all the world about it was 
green, and still black when all the world was 
white with frost. 

No time in all the year is more beautiful than 
the end of a winter's day, when the mild stillness 
is touched by an evening frost, and all the towns 
lie hidden in mist and you walk beside those 
silent woods watching them turn to stone in the 
dusk. At such a time the trees and bushes of 
the gardens that you pass, as you go towards the 
town, have the freshness and the majesty of the 
woods. It is then, in that frosty and darkening 
winter air, that the sweet breath and magic of 
the country, which in the summer would long 
since have left you, come far with you, and blow 
a little way into the very streets of the town. 



[74] 



THE MAP 

' I ^HIS happened on the road one day. You 
•■' know how sometimes far inland you will 
suddenly smell the sea in the wind. That day, 
on the French road, I smelt England in it every 
time I lifted my head and it blew on my face. 
And all that had happened was that I saw a man 
sitting by the road looking at a map. He was 
holding it wide open like a newspaper. 

It was an odd thing to see a Bartholomew's 
half-inch map on a roadside in France. As he 
held it I could read the name. It was my own old 
map ; and all its hills suddenly rose up before me 
in their clear and even line against the sky. I 
went across to him. 

"Can you tell me," said I, "if this is the road 
to Lullington?" 

He jumped, and I took a corner of the map and 
looked at it. There was the beautiful, familiar 
curve of the coast, and the roads that I had 
travelled and the names that I knew. But for 
one moment they looked very strange. All 

[75] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

names are comic until you know them, and after 
Montreuil and Arras and Amiens they were, for 
the first moment, comic — broad and blunt and 
comic as I read them — Plumpton and Iford and 
Glynde, all the little villages that you look down 
on from the hills — but only for a moment and 
then I was back among them again. And there 
across the wandering twisted English roads lay 
that faint unswerving line which marked what 
once had been the Roman road. It was like a 
sudden shadow, thrown on that peaceful col- 
oured map, by these great war roads of France. 

Then I discovered what I had never known 
before, that an old map is full of odd windows — 
little odd windows opening into the past. As I 
followed the many ways I had gone, road by 
road, name after familiar name all across from 
the silver birches of Tilgate to the Seven Sisters 
looking out to sea, those windows kept opening 
to me. Memories of little things long forgotten 
came out of the map to me. They came as 
sudden, as vivid, as unexpected as that smell of 
the sea in the wind. 

We looked at the map together for some time, 
remembering things. Then the man spoke. 

"You know that St. Crispian speech.?" he said 
abruptly. " It's about the only thing I learnt at 

[76] 



THE MAP 

school that I still remember, not all of it, just the 
bit from 'Old men forget/ I remember how I 
cried over it and thought I could never learn it, 
and had it driven into me word by word, and now 
I couldn't forget it if I tried — *01d men forget,' 
and then the English names, like a drum rolling, 

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, 

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester '* 



He stopped and looked at me. 

"That map's full of Crispian speeches," he said. 
"You can make them up as you go along and all 
as fine as Shakespeare," and he began to chant, 

" Midhurst and Petworth, Amberley, Poynings, 
Hurstpierpoint, Bramber . . . '* 

And so he went on in sonorous iambics, rolling 
off the names, until those little villages — red 
cottages and dark beech trees under the bare 
Downs — sounded like a battle cry of the names of 
great men. 

"That map's better than all the songs," he 
said, "and if I didn't carry a map I think I'd 
carry a railway guide. Then I should have all 
England in my pocket. What more do you want 
to know of any place than its name and how far 
it is to go there ^. But England is too big for any 
one man. This is my bit." 

[77] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

He put his finger on the map and moving it 
along the grass track on the top of the hills came 
to the two crossed swords above Houndean 
Bottom, and the date 1264. 

"We lived across the valley from there," he 
said. " It seemed very wonderful then to have a 
battlefield so near home. We'd look at it across 
the water-meadows. The sun used to set just 
over it and turn it all red. I used to think there 
were always men fighting somewhere over there 
where the sun set. It made life exciting, and, 
when the sun had gone, rather fearful too. One 
never knew then what might not come galloping 
down the big road. 

"It seemed to be years that I waited and 
wanted to see that battlefield, and then in the 
end I saw it, and it was nothing but a slope of 
the hills, like any other, with sheep feeding on it. 
I could have cried. Half the charm went out of 
life when I saw those sheep. There seemed 
nothing left to wonder about, or to be afraid of 
when it began to get dark. Well, I've seen 
battlefields now. 

" I went over on the Somme with the names of 
that part in my head — Wilmington, Friston, 
Beddingham, and Firle — ^the last time I went 
through Firle it was August and there was an old 

[78I 



THE MAP 

lady in her garden dusting her hollyhocks. When 
I was wounded I crawled into a trench, a chalk 
trench, and lay there. I must have got light- 
headed, for I thought I was down on the shore 
under the cliff by Cliff End, and the sea was 
coming in with a sou'wester behind it — that must 
have been the guns — and I could not get away. 
I think in my fright I tried to crawl up the 
trench side, and then I tried to say those names 
over again but they would not come right, until 
at last I got Wilmington — ^just that one; and I 
said it over and over again, slowly, when I felt 
I needed it. You know how men clutch them- 
selves sometimes when they have been hit, as if 
they were afraid that they would break into 
pieces. My head felt like that, but that name 
seemed to keep it together — 'Wilmington.' . . ." 

All the time as we talked, you understand, we 
were looking at the map together, following the 
roads, and the roads leading our thoughts. We 
talked of the inns that we both knew, and what 
we had eaten and drunk there. We went by 
those roads with giant strides. We visited each 
village like gods. 

"You'll think it absurd," he said, "but I 
always see those villages as candle-flames. It 
came to me like that one night, when there were 

[79] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

all sorts of strange glares and coloured lights in 
the sky and sudden bursts of firing. When I 
thought of those quiet villages, and the night 
quite still all round them, they seemed like no- 
thing so much as steady, mellow candle-flames, 
burning there all along the roads as you look 
over them from the Downs. 

"Some of them have burnt there untouched 
since that last battle. They may burn on for 
centuries more, and yet — half a day of war would 
snuff them all out. . . ." 

He suddenly gathered up the map and thrust it 
into his pocket ; and we got to our feet. 

*'Midhurst and Petworth, Amberley, Bramber, 
Wilmington, Friston, Beddingham and Glynde ..." 

He was chanting the names as he went on his 
way. 



[80] 



THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 

WHATEVER may be the fashion in town the 
breakfast party is no country institution; 
and that no doubt was why it caused such excite- 
ment in the village (though this we did not know 
until later) when we invited ourselves to breakfast. 
As we tramped dustily in, half an hour after the 
appointed time, our hostess met us in the middle 
of the road before her door. She was in a state 
of great excitement and distress. If you lived in 
a village and had never before entertained a 
breakfast party you would not have been tran- 
quil. Imagine her, living alone, with no one to 
share her anxieties, already past her youth and 
about to give her first breakfast party. 

She had waited; and we did not come. The 
tea was in the pot ; the kettle-lid danced upon the 
steam; and still we did not come. Everything 
was prepared — that is to say everything except 
the eggs. She must, I think, have looked fear- 
fully at them many times in that half hour. For 
you can do nothing with eggs in advance. There 
they lay, cold and horribly unready. 

[8i] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

I have never heard of anyone being haunted by 
^n cgg> but I can conceive it as a terrible thing. 
For there is an awful expressionless tranquillity 
about an egg. Even to the process of boiling it is 
utterly indifferent. Boiled or raw it is outwardly 
the same. To anyone in the nervous state of that 
good woman this peculiar indifference must have 
become maddening. I can imagine her in the end 
wildly wondering whether or not she had boiled 
them, and obsessed with a terrible longing to 
break them open and see. 

It must have been about twenty-five minutes 
after the breakfast hour that the sight of those 
eggs became more than she could endure. Anx- 
iety can make us all utterly reckless. She could 
wait no longer. She put them on to boil. We 
were not in sight, yet she put them on to boil; 
and immediately a more terrible anxiety suc- 
ceeded to the first. Would we come before they 
were boiled too hard? 

You can understand now why she met us in the 
street. Not until we were seated and the eggs 
cracked and found, after all, to be still soft, was 
peace again in that house. 

Breakfast is the meal at which anything might 
happen. There is no dish of which you can say 
beforehand that it will be out of place at break- 

[82] 



THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 

fast. It is the meal for experiments. Its very 
name premises that one may eat what one likes. 
Supper is the eating of a sop ; lunch is but a hunk 
of bread ; at tea — one drinks tea; but observe that 
at breakfast one is committed only to break one's 
fast ; the method is not prescribed by the name, 
and everyone may do it according to his choice. 
Mine is for a varied and elaborate breakfast — a 
breakfast of unexpected dishes, and I read with 
a special delight of that breakfast beginning with 
fried eggs and cocks' combs which Brother 
Eusebe served to M. Chicot at the Priory of the 
Jacobins. But in the country, where all food has 
a flavour of freshness, an early morning dew upon 
it, which has long since gone by the time it 
reaches our tables in the town, an austere break- 
fast has its own charm. To sit at a table where it 
has never been conceived that breakfast could 
consist of more than eggs and bread and butter 
is to feel ashamed of the over-decorated tables of 
town. There must of course be enough of each; 
they must have their early-morning freshness, 
and then what more could one desire than this 
virginal feast.? When Adrian found Richard 
Feverel at breakfast by the Solent Richard had 
just eaten seven eggs (that is if we allow two for 
Lucy as the feminine maximum) but we are not 

[83] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

all Meredithian young men. It is possible to be 
content with fewer. 

And then we had discovered the perfect hostess 
for such an occasion. From the moment when 
we stumbled out of the morning heat down the 
stairs into the dining room (it was one of those 
old houses that have every room on a different 
level) until the moment when we set out on the 
road again she did not cease talking. It was not 
one of those treacherous monologues with sudden 
pauses, abrupt and unsuspected chasms to en- 
gulf the inattentive, but a fresh, vivacious, un- 
staying flood of talk which neither got nor asked 
for answers. It flowed and rippled over us. We 
had come in hungry and hot, and we ate in tran- 
quillity beneath its shelter as one can sit, cool, 
dry, and luxuriously lulled by the noise, under the 
arch of a waterfall. 

In town we do not talk to our friends of all the 
preparations that we might have made to enter- 
tain them. Though why we should not talk to 
them of these things I do not know. It is the best 
of natural good manners, the true warmth of 
welcome, the most delicate flattery — thus to let 
one's guests share in the reminiscence of all the 
anxieties, the preparations, and the thought for 
their coming. This is at once to make them at 

[84] 



THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 

home. It is most hospitably to open to them not 
only the rooms but the very cupboards of the 
house. So we were made welcome. We heard of 
all that had been done, and all that had been said 
in the preparation of that breakfast — how the 
table had been laid the night before that all might 
be ready for the untimely feast, and how the 
curious neighbours had dropped in. For it was 
an event without precedent in that village. Tea 
drinkings there were in plenty, but no one had 
ever before given a breakfast party. There were 
no rules to follow, and so the neighbours came, 
for unless they saw they could not imagine how a 
breakfast party was got ready. 

At that point I was disturbed for the only time 
in my tranquil eating of eggs and bread and 
butter under that sheltering talk. I was sent to 
get the kettle from the hob that my fourth cup 
might be filled. 

It is not to be supposed that with all this talk 
we were neglected, or left to search the table for 
ourselves. A nurse could not have been more 
watchful of our wants. The cups were almost 
taken from our lips to be replenished. The eggs 
were lifted from our plates and others put in their 
place almost before our spoons had done with 
them. We wanted for nothing. And as she 

[85] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

talked and watched she broke a piece of toast on 
her plate, for she herself had breakfasted long 
before we came that she might give undivided 
attention to our entertainment. With her ec- 
centric ways, her naive and anxious prepara- 
tions, her alert and hospitable eye, her unceasing 
talk, I salute her again as the perfect hostess. 
Even her nervousness, so candidly confessed, had 
but served to put us at our ease. 

She waved us farewell as she had welcomed us, 
standing in the middle of the road before her 
door. 



[86] 



THE THUNDERSTORM 

IT was the full summertime, a hazy and still 
**• day. The heat seemed to come not from the 
half-hidden sky but from the burning white road ; 
and though it was near noon the Downs were 
grey and very distant. For by day, even when 
the air is clear, their high line seems far away, 
mysterious, and the world beyond them scarcely 
to be attained. There were no clouds in the sky, 
but there was no depth of blue either. That hot 
grey shadow, the sure warning of a storm, which 
is flung by nothing and does not move across the 
earth like the cool shadow of a cloud but lies 
upon the light itself, had passed between the 
earth and the sky. The coolness of the turf was 
gone, and all the colours seemed sucked from 
out of the world. Only the road was fiery white. 
On such a day of grey heat the weight of many 
years seems to press upon the limbs. 

A little after it left the town, and before it 
opened out on its great curve above the valley 
and turned towards the Downs, the road sank 

[871 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

very deeply between its banks. On this day 
they had the hard look of walls. They threw no 
shadow, but they seemed to hold all the dust 
of the road and to gather into them all the heat of 
the sky. Out of this prison the road lifted on to 
the curving shoulder of the hill with all the water 
meadows of the broad valley beneath. From 
here we looked straight across at the Downs and 
saw the little chalk path rising up them. In the 
greyness and heavy silence the only clear thing 
was that high chalk path far ahead. By it we 
knew that we should come to our first breath of 
coolness and a sudden sight of the sea. For there 
was no coolness at all in the unshaded space of 
the water-meadows nor in the dull and still sur- 
face of the stream, but only a hope of it beyond 
that distant road. 

We crossed the empty valley and came to a 
village where, for the first time, there were 
shadows in which the eyes might cool themselves, 
broad shadows under the beech trees and little 
shadows under the ivy leaves of the church tower, 
and a shadow, deep and dark as a grave, within 
the porch. Through a single arch of trees across 
the road we looked forward at the delicate line 
of the Downs. From this road the path, that 
had been our mark all across the valley, went up 

[88] 



THE THUNDERSTORM 

through the turf. Its glittering chalk surface was 
without dust, and in the smooth and calm face of 
the Downs there was, not coolness, but a relief 
from the dust pall of the road and the weighing 
odour of the heat. 

Already the shadow which had lain all morning 
on the light was growing deeper; and the valley 
now behind us was very dim. The whole world,' 
that had lain all morning as if dead beneath the 
heat, seemed to be changing into a grey ghost of 
itself, a ghost that was growing, each minute, 
vaguer and mistier, and that presently would 
dissolve and be blown away with the first breath 
of the wind. But there was still no wind, though 
once, in the hot silence, a lonely flutter, with a 
faint smell of salt, touched our faces. 

On the crest of the Downs the chalk path 
disappeared in the turf, as a stream goes under- 
ground, and there we came suddenly on the sea. 
Below us were long empty valleys, and the last 
broad reach of the river, dull and hard as lead, 
and dark houses and the masts of ships at its 
mouth, and beyond these the sea, grey like the 
land but with a faint scatter of the gold dust of 
the sun. 

Away to the eastwards, where the sky was 
growing darker, rolled the smoke of a gorse fire. 

[89] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

It was the only thing that moved in all the press- 
ing stillness. Within the smoke glowed broad 
orange flames, and within these flames other and 
smaller flames, red like holly berries, sharp and 
curled like holly leaves. At their vicious touch 
each great gorse bush fell, with one rending 
crackle, into grey ashes, and was left a black and 
twisted skeleton. The smoke moved slowly 
along the Downs, and as it rose disappeared into 
the greyness above, so that from those great- 
bellied clouds of smoke seemed to have come that 
shadow which filled the whole circle of the sky, 
and those orange and red flames to be the fires 
beneath the cauldron of the storm. 

It came stealthy and disguised upon us from 
beyond the rolling smoke. It came with no crash 
and parade of its forces. There were no clouds in 
the sky, but only darkness. No wind blew, and 
the first sounds of thunder were like the unin- 
tended muttering and shuffle of a great crowd 
striving to move in silence. 

These empty spaces of the Downs are without 
shelter, and we waited on the open turf. Below 
us at the shallow head of a valley a flock of sheep 
was gathered, so close and still that in the grey 
light it was like a slope of the dun-coloured turf. 
Then at last the storm began to take shape above 

[90] 



THE THUNDERSTORM 

the sea. The darkness gathered and sank, com- 
ing out of the sky into a long line of clouds that 
hung low over the very edge of the shore. These 
clouds were black above, and below the colour 
of bronze. The shore was black and desolate in 
their shadow, but in the narrow space between 
the two the sea shone with a pale and distant 
light. So clear was it and so far away under the 
dark and evil brow of the storm that it seemed as 
if suddenly we should see through it, small and 
clear, the shores and houses of France. 

The line of the clouds sank lower and lower, as 
if they would fall bodily upon the shore and crush 
it beneath their bronze shields. Then the storm 
broke across that narrow bar of the pale light of 
the sea, and the lightning stabbed furiously out of 
the clouds at the shore. There was the darkness 
of the clouds above and the darkness of their 
shadow on the shore below; and across that 
serene light between them ran the crooked and 
vicious flames. Then the rain fell, and the rain 
drops were so great that they shone in the dim- 
ness like silver. The cornfield that filled the 
bottom of the valley moved a little to the rain 
and looked like a mild green lake. The sheep did 
not stir. They had faded altogether into the 
colour of the turf. There were no trees to bend 

[91] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

and sway in terror before the anger of the storm, 
and the Downs lay under its darkness as easy 
and untroubled as a pool when a shadow passes 
over it. 

The rain fell, and it seemed as if the world, 
which had been dissolving under the heat into a 
grey ghost, would now be washed away. Then 
the rain ceased ; the heavy brow of the sky lifted, 
and the storm passed; but that hot ominous 
shadow still lay on the light of the day, and some- 
where beyond it, unseen, the storm waited. 

It had left the world utterly spent. The rain 
had washed from it the last sign of life. The 
last colour was gone. The bitter red flames 
of the gorse fire were quenched, its smoke had 
disappeared, and the dark skeletons of the gorse 
bushes stood up from the turf, darker and more 
gaunt than before. The sea no longer sparkled 
faintly, nor shone with that pale clear light. It 
lay beneath the even grey sky, as leaden and 
motionless as the land. 

So the day passed, weary and without joy. 
The day passed and the night came, hot and still, 
beneath a sky where no lights shone, an unseen 
sky, that seemed, so heavy was the night, as if it 
might have been within hand's reach above one's 
head. 

[92] 



THE THUNDERSTORM 

At last, under the darkness, the storm crept 
stealthily away. Suddenly a single star shone 
out, clear, beautiful, and distant, and at the sight 
of it the sky seemed suddenly to lift. It was as 
if a window had been opened in a hot room and 
the wind had blown in. 



[93] 



THE LITTLE STREAM 

THERE was a man in one of the fairy tales who 
could hear the grass growing — a wonderful 
thing to do, but how he must have loved the 
sudden, awesome silence of midsummer when all 
the hay was cut ! Yet even without his terrible 
gift there is one living thing which one can both 
see and hear as it grows, and that is a little 
stream. Nothing in the world grows so noisily, 
or so fast, or with such delight to be growing. 

One long warm afternoon in the Cumberland 
hills I went all the way with a stream as it grew, 
down a winding valley from the summit of High 
Street — a lonely valley with great slopes of deep 
green bracken, with grey rocks and scars of red 
earth — and in among its tufts of grass the deli- 
cate lance-heads of rushes, brown as the fresh 
turned soil, and flashing green mosses, and the 
blood-red leaves of the Venus fly-trap, an empty 
sun-bleached valley, but with all the colours 
hidden somewhere in it. 

Among the scatter of grey rocks at the valley 

[95] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

head, in a crumbled black cup of earth, was the 
beginning of the little stream, and round the 
cup lay mosses, exquisitely fine, whose tendrils 
floated away and at a touch seemed to dissolve. 
Out of this cradle cup of earth the little stream 
crept and felt its way, like a blind kitten taking 
its first steps. It spread hesitatingly among the 
moss and grey pebbles, and then, as if frightened 
to be abroad, slipped under ground again. But 
it soon got courage, and up it came, and fell with 
a splash into a little brown pool. 

There is no word to describe that first call of 
the little stream. It was something like the 
tinkle of glass, and something like the chirrup of 
an insect, but really like nothing but itself — that 
first sound of new-born water. Nor is there any 
little sound among the hills so beautiful except, 
perhaps, the clear ring of tiny stones on the 
screes. So the little stream came to life and 
started on its way. 

At first it flowed very carefully. Its waters 
came most delicately over the stones. They 
seemed to flicker like a candle flame, and to be as 
easy to snuff out. But soon it cut its narrow 
channel deep, and the long grasses stretched 
above it, and its courage rose, and its voice grew 
louder. Then it fell over its first rock with the 

[96] 



THE LITTLE STREAM 

deep sound of full water. That was the second 
call of the little stream. It was not only alive 
now, but glad to be alive. It felt its own 
strength; and suddenly it went onward faster 
than any feet could keep pace with it. 

A river is always inhuman. Beautiful or sad, 
boisterous or lazy, stately or terrible, or any one 
of a thousand different things it may be ; but it 
is always inhuman. For its energy is without 
effort. It flows on, and neither knows nor cares 
whither, or why, or how it flows. But that little 
stream was very human. It seemed to love what 
it was doing. I could see its delight. I could see 
it stretching its silver sinews as it hurried. Only 
to be moving was its desire. It cared for nothing 
else: "Faster then, faster then, faster then," was 
its song. It hurried and spluttered. It tripped 
and it tumbled. It was up and on again. Its 
waters rushed along the smooth rocks like boys 
hurrying down a slide. It plunged from pool to 
pool like a diver throwing up his heels. It cared 
nothing for the tranquil hills round it, nor for the 
stones in its course, nor the grass tufts on its 
banks ; and if it stopped in a quieter pool it was 
only for a moment before it hurried on from rock 
to hollow, from grey pool to brown. At first we 
had gone together, it and I, but now it was with 
' [97] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

me, and far ahead of me, and tumbling behind 
me, all at the same time; and I knew then that 
we were near the end of our companionship. 

With a last plunge the little stream fell into one 
of those beautiful pools which are neither grey 
nor green, but a colour of their own, a colour still 
without a name, the colour of perfect purity. 

There the little stream ended. It flowed out of 
that pool, but it was changed. It was a burn or a 
beck, or what you will, but it was no longer a 
little stream. It flowed on, with rapids and falls, 
by stagnant back-waters where the flies skated, 
and by greater pools where men fished and 
bathed. It flowed on without effort, and it 
neither knew nor cared whither or how it flowed. 

It is said sometimes of the hills that they defy 
time, but they are merely indifferent to it. It is 
the rivers which defy time, for they are always 
changing and always the same; they can be all 
ages as they will. They can rollick in youth and 
ripple placidly in middle age, and drag their steps 
among their stones, old and decrepit; and they 
can do these things in any order they will, and 
do them over and over again. They can be old 
before they leave their first valley, and young 
again the moment before they plunge into the 
sea. But a little stream cannot do these things. 

[98] 



THE LITTLE STREAM 

It cannot defy time. Once it has ceased to be a 
little stream it can never become one again. And 
this little stream, my companion, came to an end 
in this pool which was as clear and serene as 
untroubled sleep. 



[99] 



THE EXILE 

f TE had the peasant's great attachment to his 
'*' •■• soil. To him Belgium was that acre in 
Brabant which was his garden. He was a tree 
taken from the earth. His patriotism was not an 
idea on which even in exile, he could feed the soul. 
Still less was it an affair of governments or men. 
It was for him home. 

Cest la douce folic 

De recolter ce qu'on s^me, 

Et Tabsurd passion 

De posseder ce qu'on aime. 

It was literally of the earth. 

He was a man of great ignorance and great 
curiosity. Both were singularly attractive. Of 
England he had known nothing at all. He saw it 
for the first time on a railway map at Ostend 
during his flight, and wondered if so small a place 
could offer him any safety. Yet even this na'ive 
astonishment did not get the better of his thrifty 
good sense. He met English soldiers as they 
landed, and changed his Belgian for their English 

[lOl] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

money, so that in the end he came to England 
with a pound's worth of EngHsh pennies in his 
bag. 

The sea he had never seen before. At any 
other time to have embarked on it would have 
been an awful adventure. But at that moment 
with the terror behind he would, he said, have 
set out for America without a thought. When he 
was settled in an English sea-side town the first 
fresh wonder of it returned to him. The tides 
were a perpetual marvel, and he would hardly 
credit it that the wind could make the waves — 
though the rumour of such things had reached his 
village. He delighted to talk of all these won- 
ders. Indeed all natural science delighted him. 
He could not hear enough of the earth and the 
stars. He was untravelled but he had a continual 
and eager curiosity. He had that upstanding 
quality of mind which is neither silent nor over- 
come, but remains always interested and critical 
before any new thing. And so when, in middle 
age, he was rudely thrust into this first great 
journey of his life, when he found himself with 
his family, a little money, and a single bag in an 
unknown country, he was neither abashed nor 
fumbling. He carried himself as he should. 
There was something singularly engaging in the 

[102] 



THE EXILE 

contrasts of his character, the untravelled igno- 
rance which he never tried to conceal, his tact and 
good sense as of a travelled man. 

On men and manners he had his ideas. Some 
of them, he said, he kept to himself, in his village. 
They would have been looked at askance. They 
would have come to the ears of the cure. His 
delight was great when he found that these ideas 
which were his own, which he dared not share, 
were the ideas of many men. 

Romance he did not understand. To him it 
was the feuilleton of a halfpenny paper. The 
world, he thought, was already so full of wonders 
to be discovered, like the waves and the tides, 
that he could not understand why men should 
trouble to invent things. When Dumas was 
brought (from the very small French shelf of the 
local library) he put him aside with a shrug. 
They were romances, he supposed. His wife 
might read them. For himself, he had not the 
taste. But in the absence of anything more 
scientific he consented to look at La Bruyere's 
"Characters," and was greatly entertained. He 
showed a child's delight when he found among 
them reflections which he had already made for 
himself in his observation of men. 

Yet though Romance was hidden from him he 

[103] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

spoke of his village, of the characters and the 
fields and the woods, the labours and the plays, 
of that little place — and of his delight in them— • 
all unconsciously with the poet's speech. He had 
the poet's speech because he had never lost the 
eagerness of a child. He loved his tools almost as 
living things. He possessed his house as a child 
would possess a toy house. He talked of all that 
it contained like a child fondling its toys. And 
so, though he did not know it, that village be- 
came as he spoke like a place in a book, clear, 
detached, complete, touched with humour and 
enchantment. 

There was his friendship with the burgomaster, 
the great man of the village ; there was the village 
concert where the famous singer from Brussels, 
spending her holiday in the country and singing 
by great condescension, was unapplauded, while 
the village comedian brought down the house. 
He acted the little scene of the gaping uncompre- 
hension of the villagers changing to broad 
delight. 

There were the days that he spent in the winter 
woods cutting fuel, and his happiness in the mere 
presence of the earth and the trees. There was 
that summer evening when he heard an unseen 
horn, far away in the stillness, playing a mourn- 

[104] 



THE EXILE 

ful old hunting air, and he climbed to the roof of 
his house with his ochrina and, sitting there, 
played it back through the dusk. He described 
it until you almost smelt the smoke of the even- 
ing going up from the fields. 

But it was only his own soil that wakened the 
poet in this exile who did not know Romance. 
He marvelled at the sea, but at the woods and 
fields and hills of England he looked with an 
unseeing eye. They were not his home. 

Many men are indolent in misfortune, but he 
rose briskly to its opportunities. If he did not go 
travelling by his own choice, he would at least 
not refuse its benefits. His curiosity and his 
pleasure in new things were his support. Yet at 
heart he remained an exile. It was only as he 
worked in a garden that he felt himself once 
again in Brabant. Then, as he turned the earth, 
he was near his home ; but the thought of it 
troubled him always. What would become of 
that square grey house, with the garden and the 
clump of osiers, on its little eminence in the 
Brabant plain? They were more than worldly 
goods. They were his Belgium. 

He was safe, cared for, prosperous, but "la 
douce folie" drove him home. He knew at least, 
when he set out, that his house had not been 

[1051 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

destroyed. But how much more of the rest, that 
he went to seek did he find — of the village and 
all that pleasant company of which he used to 
speak ? 

He might have been less an exile if he had 
stayed in England, and nearer to his old home, 
talking and dreaming of it, and turning the earth 
in an English garden. 



[106] 



SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 

OF all the figures of speech which the Bible has 
made most familiar in our mouths none is 
stranger than the Lamb of God. We have for- 
gotten in it the literal meaning of lamb ; we have 
forgotten the original Hebrew meaning of the 
burnt offering of a lamb to God. That phrase has 
been lifted far away from all that it once was, and 
now, beautifully but strangely, it expresses for 
us, through the gentleness of a timid and stupid 
animal, the most courageous and wonderful 
gentleness in the world. 

Language is full of these words that lead 
double lives. It is indeed one of the great proofs 
that words do indeed live. Those who work with 
them work with living things. Let us remember 
this and use them with reverence. Neither wood 
nor stone, gold, nor the richest colour, nor any 
other of the things that men use in their arts is 
living but only words. 

If one wanted any other proof that words are 
living things it is that the language is full of dead 

[107] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

words, words that men have killed by using them 
too much, or by misusing them. But many of 
them get no rest even in death, for men who do 
not know that they are dead — since they never 
realised that they could live— drag their corpses 
about and hang them up on their sentences, as 
savages decorate their huts with scalps and bones. 

And we all take up our pens, and order the 
words out, and turn them and twist them, and 
hustle and push them, until we have them where 
we think that they should be. We even play 
tricks with them, and, in our assurance, tell them 
to mean things that they never meant before. 
And these words that we so lightly use were living 
centuries before us, and will be living long after 
we are gone — long after what we did with them, 
whether good or bad, has been forgotten. They 
are living things. Associations have gathered 
about them. Great men have used them, and 
they have lived on enriched by that companion- 
ship. They have memories fuller than the mem- 
ory of any man. To those who have the ears 
they speak of a thousand things that they know 
and of a thousand places where they have been. 

We pick up this or that piece of stuff and say, 
"This was part of the dress of Queen Elizabeth. 
How strange to think that she actually wore it ! 

[io8] 



SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 

It makes one realise that she was a living woman 
more than all the history books." Or we look 
round a panelled room, and murmur, "What a 
funny old bed. There were no spring mattresses 
in those days, but how wonderful to think that 
Charles I. actually slept in it. He must have 
looked out of this window standing where we are 
now before he went down to breakfast — ^but 
perhaps they didn't have breakfast then. Really 
one wouldn't be surprised to see him come in at 
that door." Or we stand in front of a Crusader's 
sword : "To think that perhaps this black mark is 
the blood of a man who died centuries ago. This 
does make one feel the past. I wish they did not 
say we are not to touch." 

But no one ever thinks in this way of words 
or remembers how old they are, or treats them as 
living things, things which are not forbidden to 
him to touch, but which he may use, and which 
unite him with many centuries, and with great 
men long since dead. No man has ever said to 
another, "Sir, that word you have just spoken 
(though you have not used it in quite the right 
sense) gave much delight to Chaucer. You have 
only to see how he used it here and used it there, 
to know that he must have loved the very sound 
of it." Or, "Speak that word with some rever- 

[109] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

ence. You can see, reading it in such a play, that 
it was like a trumpet to Shakespeare. It stirred 
him to the heart. When he wrote it down he was 
looking out across all England, and remembering 
his love for the fields and woods and river of his 
own home. He saw men going out to die for her. 
He must have felt, for that moment when he 
wrote it, as if his quill feathered an arrow which 
he was fitting to a long bow. Do not use that 
word ignobly. It may be a poor thing to you, but 
it has lived greatly." 

Though we do not speak in this way, nor 
remember the history of words ; nor think of them 
as uniting us to our past ; nor feel that great men 
live in them, as much as in the clothes they wore 
or the swords they carried or the rooms where 
they slept, yet unconsciously we are under the 
influence of their rich companionships. These 
indeed do change them. So that not only may 
the same word mean entirely different things and 
we not feel it strange, but the very sound of it 
be changed to our ears, and, according to its 
meaning, be noble or mean, beautiful or ugly. 
It is only the very childish or very primitive 
mind which feels it comic that one word should 
mean two different things, or be reminded of the 
one when he hears the other. 

[no] 



SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 

So it is with this strange word "lamb." I still 
have a well-inked school-book called "Chosen 
English" in which, above the essay on Chimney 
Sweepers, some unknown hand wrote, after the 
word "Lamb," "And Mint Sauce." I believe 
that I was annoyed at the time; for that essay, 
with its rich and coloured quaintness, was a new 
country of words for me ; but now I treasure the 
book for the sake of that annotation. 

Lambs of the flock, lamb and mint sauce, 
Charles Lamb, the Lamb of God — there is no 
word in all the language so modestly born, that 
has lived such a variety of wonderful lives and 
has been so enriched and ennobled by its past. 

Yet there is another reason why that last and 
most singular phrase, the Lamb of God, might 
suddenly and fantastically be chosen by a mind 
which knew nothing of its past, to describe a 
gentle God come to earth among men. For liter- 
ally, as one looks at a flock of sheep on the 
Downs, it might be something come from the sky. 
There is nothing on earth more like the gentle, 
wandering, white clouds of summer. So do the 
sheep wander across the green curves of the 
Downs which are as smooth as the hollows of the 
sky above. They move exactly like the summer 
clouds, never still yet never hurrying, always 

[III] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

changing yet always the same, dividing, uniting, 
wandering on, as gentle and unconcerned as a 
cloud, until they slip over the crest of a hill and 
are gone, as if, like a cloud, the sun had drawn 
them away. And the grey sheep-dogs pass in 
and out among them, moving them this way and 
that, turning them and guiding them, all uncon- 
scious, like little puffs of dark wind blowing 
through the clouds. 

On this day that I have in mind we were com- 
ing down one of the deep coombes above Firle, 
where the chalk path went between banks of my 
lady's bedstraw, and in the fields that filled the 
bottom of the hollow was a shepherd with his 
flock. The sheep were gathered in a dark patch, 
rather deep in growth, and the shepherd stood 
beyond, an old man who moved very stiff and 
slow. Then his high harsh, and, as it seemed, 
scarcely human voice came up to us, and sud- 
denly his dog had split the flock, as the wind will 
suddenly split the clouds on a stormy day right 
through to the sun. 

Sheep feed so quietly, move so suddenly when 
the dog moves, and stop so abruptly when he has 
passed, that they seem to have a very great 
speed, and this change from utter peace to fu- 
rious movement, and back to peace again, is as 

[112] 



SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 

awesome as the sudden coming and going of the 
wind round a house on a still night. The dog 
seems to run with such savagery, the sheep to 
fly with such terror, and then — the dog is sitting 
quietly on his haunches, and the sheep are feed- 
ing again as though through the whole day they 
had not moved more than a step at a time, nor 
lifted their heads from cropping. It is like the 
beginning of a sudden tragedy, and the stillness 
afterwards, but the tragic act itself left out. And 
all the while the master of the show stood at the 
back not moving, and we heard the high distant 
sound of his voice but no intelligible words. 

Then he counted his flock, and the dog gath- 
ered it together again, and it drifted away until a 
curve of the hillside hid it, the dog moving like a 
shadow on the turf and the sheep like a wander- 
ing cloud. 



[113] 



ROADS OF WAR 

IT was in a mining village in the north of 
'*' France, and troops were going through, 
stumbling and splashing and singing and then 
falling suddenly into silence. The road was 
horribly worn, with deep holes full of black liquid 
mud, yet on this windy autumn afternoon it was 
a strange and wonderful road. Just beyond the 
village it rose a little from the flatness and made 
a firm ridge against the sky, and along the ridge 
and across the road the rain was blowing in 
sudden silver gusts. When they passed the air 
was very clear, and it looked as though from that 
road, ending abrupt and clean at the top of the 
ridge, one could step straight into the clouds. 

I had been watching the road for some time 
when I saw the Frenchman standing close under 
the wall of a house across the village street. I 
saw him when he waved to one of our men. He 
looked to be over middle age — of solid and 
rounded figure with a heavy spade beard — ^but 
when I crossed and spoke to him, and he turned, 

[115I 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

I saw only the youth of his eyes, and, as he spoke, 
of his vivacious hands. 

"What am I doing," said he, "in the wind and 
the rain ? I watch the troops and the road. I am 
a lover of roads," and he smiled. Then he drew 
himself up. "I have worked on the roads," he 
said, " I was of those who worked on the road that 
saved France;" and at that he crossed himself. 

A battalion went by and we two stood watch- 
ing it. As the last company passed over the 
ridge the rain blew down again and hid the men. 
It came with the suddenness of a door closing 
behind them. 

"A few miles, and the road ends, is it not so?" 
said the Frenchman. 

"Yes," said I. "Before very long they'll go 
underground." 

"And yet," he said, "to look at it you would 
think it never ended, that road." 

The rain gust had passed and the ridge stood 
up against the low clouds. I was thinking of 
those roads across the Downs that you see many 
miles away, white in the green turf, that seem to 
end suddenly at the steps of the sky. But the 
Frenchman was thinking of other things. 

"You might cross Europe by that road," he 
said. "Such roads are great roads. No one 

[116] 



ROADS OF WAR 

knows how far one may go by them ; even the sea 
cannot stop them. Your old roads in England, 
are they not after all ours ? The Romans made 
them for you. They are the roads of Gaul that 
went on and crossed England as if your channel 
had not been there." 

He raised his eyebrows as if he were waiting to 
see what I should say to that. 

"But there are others," I said; **some that 
were there even before your roadmakers came 
from Gaul." And I told him of the old turf road 
from Winchester to Canterbury and then of a 
warm summer road lifting and falling over the 
feet of the Downs, a rambling, winding, beautiful 
road, with red villages and beech trees and tower- 
ing hedges all flowers — such hedges as do not 
grow in France. As I talked I could almost smell 
its clean and kindly dust. 

The Frenchman was staring up that straight 
road as I talked. When I finished he turned and 
looked at me, an odd look that was half amuse- 
ment, half surprise. 

**Ah — it is so that you think of roads," said 
he; "but you must understand that we have 
suffered on the roads, we French. ' 

He paused for a moment, as if searching for 
what he wanted to say. 

["71 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

"Look," he went on; "they are to us what the 
sea is to you. We have laid our bones at the road- 
side. I could tell you tales of the roads. Three 
generations of us have tales to tell of them. 

"When I was little and he was very old, my 
grandfather used to tell me a tale of the road — 
the road from Brussels to Charleroi, the last road 
that the Great Army travelled. He was only a 
boy when he went by it, but it was in his memory 
after he had forgotten nearly everything else. 
He would tell me how he left the road, worn out, 
and lay for the night in a field ; and all that night 
he heard the army hurrying by on that road. 
*Like the noise of a river in flood,' he would say, 
and I could see his old hands tremble Mike the 
Isere' — ^for that was the river I knew. It is 
always grey and tumbling. He told the tale 
always in the same way — ^for he was then a very 
old man — ^until I saw that road as half road, half 
river, as a road with a river pouring down it — I 
knew not what — and men were struggling in it, 
as once I had seen a man struggle in the Isere 
under the white bridges. But that road haunted 
me! 

"And my father would tell his tale of the 
roads. They would talk together, he and old 
grandfather, and he would shake his head, for 

[ii8] 



ROADS OF WAR 

the road he knew was from Metz to Verdun. He 
had seen the Emperor ride out on that road from 
Gravelotte, on his way back to Verdun, and when 
he saw his face — so he would tell the story — he 
said, *It is finished.' All France believed then in 
Bazaine, but when he saw the Emperor's face 
that day he said, *It is finished.' And that was 
before Rezonville was fought. He would tell us 
of that battle. He would tell us how they fought 
for that road, the great road from Metz to Ver- 
dun, lest the Prussians should cross it and cut 
them off from France, and how in the afternoon 
they drove the Prussians back across that road, 
and had them beaten, if only they had known. 

"'If only we had known,' he would say sadly, 
and then his face would grow eager. ' But French 
armies will go again by that road from Verdun 
to Metz,' he would say. ' Do not forget, you may 
go with them.' And he would describe a little 
wood with wide clearings, by the roadside where 
they drove the Germans out. (It was there that 
he killed his German, fighting hand to hand.) 
He would describe it very carefully that I, when 
I went by that road to capture Metz, might know 
it again. 

"And so when I shovelled there on the road up 
to Verdun, I thought of those two and of their 

[119] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

tales of the roads, and of their pride in me, could 
they have seen me; and I would say, 'This is the 
road to Metz, one must look beyond/ When all 
the world spoke of Verdun I looked beyond. I 
remembered that this also was the road to 
Metz." 

He stopped, and we stepped close in under the 
wall as a column of ponderous hooded motor 
lorries went through the village and over the 
ridge. The Frenchman watched them with a 
kindling eye until the last had gone, then he 
turned to me and smiled, brushing the rain from 
his beard. 

"Monsieur will understand," he said, "why I 
am a lover of roads." 



[120] 



THE SPRING RIVER 

r'OR more than a week the mill at the weir had 
* stood idle, cut off from the stream. The 
river was moving too full and strong for its old 
joints. It was at the level of the fields, the beds 
of reeds were hidden; the willow trees dipped 
deep in its flood; the middle of its course was 
marked continually with ragged drifts of foam, 
and its waters fell across the weir with the long 
vibrating sound of the distant sea. They fell, 
smoothly, unhurriedly, in a strong clean curve as 
of steel ; and then at the bottom they broke into 
water again and their foam rose, like little angry 
heads, and hit back hurriedly at the weir. 

In that full smooth curve of water there was a 
spell — not the evil spell that the hurrying 
unending movement of water, always changing 
and always the same can sometimes put on the 
senses of men, luring their minds away until it 
draws them down into it to their destruction — 
but the good spell of a thing that holds the senses 
and mind together. It was the double spell of a 

[121] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

thing living and moving and yet at the same time 
fixed in a beautiful shape. That curve of water 
was as full and complete and unchanging as a 
great curve of the green Downs, or the line of a 
statue, but it moved more quickly than the eye 
could follow. 

The spring flood of the river is not so beautiful 
nor so mysterious as the autumn flood. In the 
still autumn the river is a mirror of lovely things. 
It is deep-bosomed and the colour of old silver. 
It flows slowly, so brimming full that its centre 
seems higher than its low banks. Its willows are 
turned to gold; the green beeches carry golden 
crests, and everything — trees and fields, hedges 
and reeds, all the rich and coloured ripeness of 
autumn — is thrown into its waters with not a line 
broken nor a colour dimmed. At every bend of 
its winding course its banks meet in the reflection. 
You seem to pass not along your familiar river, 
but from pool to hidden pool ; and as you enter 
each your way closes mysteriously behind. 

But this spring flood was a hurrying of brown 
and naked waters in a brown world. Everything 
was brown, from the earth-stained river to the 
ploughed fields deep coloured with the rains, and 
the branches of the high trees. It was the last 
brown look of the world before the green came. 

[122] 



THE SPRING RIVER 

The winds had driven the mists away into the far 
distance, and in their place was the pale and 
wandering sunhght of spring, coming, going, and 
coming again, as the wind blew 

To the bare brown branches of the hedges a few 
briar leaves still clung, yellow as parchment and 
crimson rimmed, the last forgotten flags still 
flying for the old year, dead three months before. 
But in their sheltered under-hollows the green 
was already coming, and all along the river banks 
the bare willow branches were like soft brown 
mists with a green shadow lurking in them. 

Across that brown world the wind galloped, 
carrying clouds and sunshine with it. The 
clouds, as they passed, turned their black faces 
to the earth and threw back a winter darkness 
into the empty branches of the trees, and the 
wandering sunshine lit on those green shadows 
as they waited for their time. 

But for the moment the world belonged to the 
hurrying river. Its banks and its trees no longer 
hid it. One could see it far across the fields. In 
the distance were curves and long reaches which 
no one seemed to have known to be there. In 
some places it flowed high and clear, in others it 
was a brown mist. In others, it had poured out, 
filled a field with silver and then hurried on. In 

[123] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

a little it would sink and sink again beneath the 
red sand and deep green eaves of its banks, and 
the reeds would spring up, and the willows and 
the grasses bend over to hide its waters; and it 
would flow on, easy and unconcerned, and care 
nothing whether it was seen or hidden. 

But now it was in front of all the other things 
of the world. The rains had brought the new life 
to it, while they still waited. It would be seen. 
And every little stream and every ditch had the 
same ambition. They too were swollen with 
importance and sudden waters. For a little time 
they too were rivers. They had lain muddy and 
stagnant. Leaves and branches and all the dead 
things of the banks had fallen into them, and 
stayed there rotting. Their waters had grown 
tainted, with no power to cover the dead things 
or to sweep them away. And then the rains 
came, and they were full of fierce and living 
waters. They had at last the power to move, a 
current that could beat on the banks and strike 
up a song. So they went, lapping against the 
drain pipes, as the rivers lap round their bridges, 
sweeping in sudden musical rushes against the 
submerged twigs, whirling in gay eddies and 
little dancing hollows of water. To them also 
this sudden life had come while the rest of the 

[I24l 



THE SPRING RIVER 

world still waited. It was as short as a gnat's 
life, but as gay. These ditches were the dancing, 
singing insects of this time when the world waited 
for spring. In a very little while the waters that 
filled them would have gone as suddenly as they 
had come. They would dry in the heat and be 
still again, and the living gnats would dance 
above them in the sunshine 

When the half gods go 
The gods arrive. 

But for this little while it was they that lived, 
and danced, and sung. 



[1^51 



THE COUNTRY ^BUS 

IT was on this day, a warm day in July, that I 
swore to abjure from that time forward all 
such phrases as steam-power, petrol-power, and 
electric-power, as phrases made by a mechanical 
age to its false glorification, as phrases misusing 
a great word, and harmful to whatever is beauti- 
ful and truthful in our speech. 

Consider the things that we burn to serve our 
different ends. Of them all wood is the greatest. 
It is the oldest, by some thousands of years, the 
most kindly and the most beautiful ; and men by 
burning it have done wonderful things. It was 
by wood, when they first set light to it, that they 
first raised themselves a little above the beasts — 
there was power indeed! — and to this day the 
smell and sound of a wood fire fill men with a 
happiness which they cannot explain. Yet no 
one has ever spoken of wood-power. Men have 
called it a fuel from the beginning to this day. 
Why should petrol have a greater name .? Let us 
keep that word "power" for the things that move 

[127] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

the souls of men, and call a fuel a fuel however 
fast we may travel by it. Some day, when the 
world is cured of our particular follies, a wise 
critic will put his finger on that word ** power," 
and explain our age by it, pointing out how we 
gave it to all the wrong things. 

Having talked of these false powers like the 
rest, I saw suddenly the folly and the vulgarity 
and the falsehood of it on this afternoon in July, 
standing by the main road from Salisbury to 
Blandford which goes by way of Tarrant Hinton, 
leaving ToUard Royal on the right and on the 
left Gussage St. Michael, Gussage All Saints, and 
Wimborne St. Giles, places which I have never 
seen, but whose names upon the map enrich the 
countryside. We had gone down by the side of a 
British village, under the crest of the Downs on 
their southern slope, where now only wild thorns 
grow, and by the chase where the deer-stealers 
used to lie hid in the trees, and across a field 
which of all the English fields I have ever seen 
did most deserve that phrase "painted with 
delight." Its rich and ancient turf, that can 
never have known the plough, blossomed, like 
triumphant youth, with thyme and trefoil and 
rock roses, and its wild strawberries were in full 
fruit. Purple and orange, blood-red and the pale 

[128] 



THE COUNTRY 'BUS 

gold of the stars — it was painted these colours 
across four splendid acres of delight. 

At the bottom of the field was a causeway, 
which once had carried a Roman road. There it 
was, clear, solid, not to be mistaken, raised a foot 
or perhaps two, above the fields. The turf now 
covered it and the rabbits burrowed in its sides, 
nor had anyone marched by it for many hun- 
dreds of years, yet in its age and decay it was 
still masterful. For among that open turf, with- 
out tree or hedge, one stood upon it — and how 
much more would not one have marched along 
it .? — as if one were high above the surrounding 
country and commanded it all. 

Beside it ran the modern road, smooth and 
beautifully clean, powdered with fine white 
stones that glittered a little in the sun, showing 
no mark of the rare traflSc which travelled by it, 
pressing a few inches below the level of the turf 
on either side. It looked like a carpet which, 
that very morning, had been laid, fresh and new, 
across the fields, and by evening would be rolled 
up again and carried away, leaving the grasses 
beneath it to raise their heads in the dews of 
night, and the ghosts to travel by that ancient 
causeway of a thousand years. 

To us in that contented mellow time of mid- 
9 [129] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

afternoon, as we stood between the two roads, 
feeling the influences which lived mysteriously in 
that old turf, came the country bus, lifting slowly 
over the full curve of the white road. It was 
driven — let it be said for the last time — ^by petrol 
power. But what power had petrol over it? 
Upon its high roof, set round with a small iron 
rail, its passengers stiffly sat on stools. Their 
multitudinous parcels — for it was market day — 
lay round their feet, and the ladder by which they 
had climbed was strapped to the bus's side. Up 
the short and easy hill it came, at a staid four, or 
it may have been five, miles an hour, and we 
laughed aloud with delight to see it, for it had 
an air that is not to be described of rustic 
and ancient things. It was a revelation of the 
enduring spirit triumphant over all material 
change. 

Along the road there came a puff of dust to- 
wards it, and a motor bicycle went by. In that 
magic moment there would have been no sur- 
prise if the bicycle had suddenly stopped and a 
masked figure in its saddle held up the driver of 
the bus with a pistol. Had the bus itself come 
rolling and rumbling along the Roman causeway 
instead of the modern road, it would have seemed 
more natural. It was as if petrol power— the 

[130I 



THE COUNTRY 'BUS 

phrase shall be used no more — instead of sweep- 
ing us onward into a glorious future of liquid and 
electric fuels, had suddenly gone all astray and 
carried us into past centuries. Tom Jones might 
have hailed that bus from the roadside, as he 
journeyed from Gloucester to London, and never 
noticed that no horses drew it. Mr. Wardle 
might have entertained luncheon party after 
luncheon party on its roof and never realised 
that he sat above an internal combustion engine. 
For in that motor bus still travelled the spirit of 
all country coaches as it must have been since 
roads were first made and wheels to run upon 
them; and neither steam nor petrol nor any 
such thing has had or ever can have any power 
over it. 

Someday airplanes will have taken the place 
of all the buses, but still that indomitable spirit 
of the country road will travel on whatever 
machine shall fly from Salisbury to Blandford, 
going by way of Tarrant Hinton, and leaving 
ToUard Royal on the right and on the left Gus- 
sage St. Michael, Gussage All Saints, and Wim- 
borne St. Giles 

I can see it. It will be such an ancient, comic, 
rustic thing, lumbering above the road, that still 
Tom Jones might hail it without surprise, or 

[131] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

Mr. Wardle unpack pigeon pie and lobsters sit- 
ting on its wings. 



Turning we went back across the Roman road, 
where already the rabbits were sitting at their 
ease in the evening sun. We went solemnly and 
with a strange content. When the bus had 
crossed the hill and we had laughed at it, we felt 
as if, in that brief moment, we had slipped from 
the power of time and seen the borderlands be- 
yond. For what, after all, can Eternity be, if it 
is not to have all the new things without losing 
or changing any of the old ? 



[132] 



THE ENCHANTED FOREST 

* I ^O Keats it was full of fruits and paths and 
^ ferns, and rushes and ivy banks; and to 
Coleridge it was of cedar trees; and to Shake- 
speare of oak and thorn and elm and all the 
flowers of English field and hedge, and Midsum- 
mer in it came in May; and to Lucian it was of 
pines and cypresses growing out of the sea, and 
his ship sailed over its leafy tops; and to Virgil 
it was of pines and great holm oaks and there he 
found the enchanted golden bough, growing on 
an oak tree like the mistletoe ; and to the Brothers 
Grimm it was full of quaint and homely things 
like the tree that opened with a golden key and 
had a basin of bread and milk inside — though 
what the tree was they do not say; and to Hans 
Andersen it stood high above the sea, and the old 
oak tree in it dreamed dreams. 

Such a forest, so wonderful and so diverse, to 
be recognised by so many different things, cannot 
be hard to find, and many times we two thought 
that we had reached its borderland or were on a 

[133] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

road that would lead us to it. Once it was in a 

little wood of dead fir trees standing forlorn on 

the open Downs with the trees so close together 

that one could scarcely go into it ; and within it 

was as dark and still as a shuttered room. Once 

it was in a wanton and beautiful lane which 

started from nowhere on the side of Windover 

Hill, and was so deep in tall grasses and so roofed 

and arched with bushes that it was less like a 

road than a twisting green pipe, leading down 

and down until we thought that it must take us 

at last into the very heart of ancient forests, 

into 

Gloomy shades, sequestered deep. 
Where no man went. 

But instead it brought us out to a plain high 
road. And many times we thought we must be 
near it when we were walking on the Downs 
where the great trees have come up from the 
weald, and stand along each side of the old turf 
road, so that you look always downwards into 
the woods, among the olive trunks of the beeches 
where the air is like still green water, and down 
long low aisles of hazel bushes with little un- 
coloured Gothic windows at the end. But the 
enchanted forest was among none of these. 

[i34l 



THE ENCHANTED FOREST 

Then one hot day in summer when the road- 
side hedges were grey with dust, and the air was 
shimmering, and the chalk track up the Downs 
was more dazzhng in the sun than snow, we 
cHmbed from the weald until at last we saw the 
sea, not cool and green and full of delight but like 
a great grey plain with a hard glitter of gold 
under the sun. So, longing for coolness and for 
rest, we threw ourselves down on the turf where a 
little wind moved, and lost all the world but the 
grass heads nodding above our faces and above 
them the sky. In that place, where the nearest 
tree was miles away and the tallest bush was no 
taller than a man, I found the enchanted forest. 

The sun was hot on my eyelids, and I turned 
over to escape it, pressing my face deep down to 
the grass roots where, even on this hot day, the 
sun's rays had not pierced and there lingered 
still an odorous dampness. The grasses seemed 
to rise enormously above me, standing against 
the sky. In that drowsy dreaming heat, all of 
my body beyond my shoulder was asleep and 
forgotten. I lived only in one ear, pressed deep 
into the sweet moist turf, listening to the little 
sounds that ran softly through it, and one eye 
beneath a flickering lid that peered through the 
undergrowth. I was sunk deep in this little 

[135] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

forest where the ants and spiders can find shade, 
looking up at the slender grass stems which 
seemed so tall that only those with wings could 
ever reach their nodding heads. 

It was an ant that I saw first, travelling 
through the forest with a load as large as herself, 
toiling up and down over the pathless, terrible 
tangle of the green grass blades. It was like a 
jungle laced across and across with creepers; it 
was like that enchanted forest in a Russian fairy 
tale which grew from a comb so that the witch 
was caught in its twisting branches and, fight 
as she would, could not go on. But the ant 
struggled up and tumbled down, never forsaking 
her load, sometimes pushing it up before her, 
sometimes moving backwards as she climbed, 
and drawing it after her. I seemed, as I watched 
her on this courageous journey, to be no bigger 
than she. I felt, through her, the awful toils of 
that jungle below the grass stems. High above 
me a fly sat with diamond wings. He could fly 
above it all ; it had no toils for him ; and on an- 
other stem, nearly at the tufted head, sat a snail. 
The slender stem bent a little under his weight. 
As I looked up at him from the depths below, 
where I stood and the ant struggled, I felt for 
him an envy and an admiration such as I had 

fi36] 



THE ENCHANTED FOREST 

never thought before that a snail could inspire. 
He had no wings to carry him out of that jungle. 
He was not better equipped than the ant and I. 
He had nothing but a firm grip and a determined 
heart, and there was he at the top of the highest 
tree, far above the undergrowth, sitting where 
the winged things came. 

I had turned towards the ant again in her 
struggles when suddenly there came a flash of 
darkness on us two below as if a cloud had passed 
above the forest, and I looked up to see that a 
butterfly had settled on a grass's head near the 
snail. That moment's darkness was thrown by 
her wings before she closed them. Away beyond 
her was a great scarlet circle like the setting of 
some monstrous sun above the tree tops. 

All was still for a time in that enchanted place. 
The butterfly and the snail and the fly sat on 
their tree tops. The ant had dropped her burden 
and returned for it. The undergrowth was full of 
the wet sweet smell of earth and of grass. Then, 
far away, beyond the great red sun and the edges 
of the world, came a strange shrill song, louder 
than all the winds. It lasted for a long time ris- 
mg and falling, and at last it ceased — to be 
followed by a more terrible thing, for through the 
forest came a great green creature, not climbing 

[137] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

over its undergrowth, as the ant climbed, nor 
trampHng it down as it walked, but in enormous 
leaps that lifted it over glade and thicket and the 
high tree tops. Its last leap carried it right across 
the face of the red sun, and it looked as if it were 
passing clean out of the forest into the sky, but it 
came to earth, crouching on the tangled under- 
growth, and the song burst out again filling all 
the forest with its noise. 

Then the song stopped — suddenly stopped, but 
the great green thing still crouched, and in the 
awesome sinister silence which followed that 
song I started, and sat up. 

I was in my own world again. It was there 
unaltered, as when I had lain down, and all 
around was the curving sunlit turf. 

I looked down at the turf where I sat. A single 
poppy was growing just within reach of my hand, 
and I saw a tiny snail at the top of a stem of 
grass. As I looked a grasshopper jumped before 
me and disappeared. 

Away to the southwards was the grey sea, and 
northwards were the dark woods of the weald. I 
thought of them as they might be, in monstrous 
dreams, with an undergrowth so tangled and 
thick that no man could force his way through 
it; with birds as large as clouds settling on their 

[138] 



THE ENCHANTED FOREST 

branches, with strange creatures in shells slowly 
climbing their trunks; with enormous green 
dragons leaping through them higher than their 
tree tops, and singing terrible triumphant songs 
that shook them as if the''^ had been reeds. 



[139] 



THE FISHERMEN OF AMBERLEY 

/^F their craft I know nothing, nor of its 
^^ pleasures. There have been fishermen in 
the family but I am not of these. I understand 
the delights of walking and sleeping in the open 
air, but of that subtle, and, as I can well believe 
it to be, that delectable state between the two 
extremes in which fishermen seem to live, I know 
nothing. I have no right to speak of them at all, 
except that I love them. I love them as I love 
the windmills, and the little solitary trees on the 
Downs, and the cows in the fields and the golden 
ricks. I love them as part of the landscape. 
They are not so beautiful as the willows, which, 
like them, dip delicate branches into the stream, 
but, like the willows, they breathe that perfect 
content of slow, silver streams and water mead- 
ows where the cattle feed and the gentle twilight 
of summer evening. There they sit. . . . 
They are common men as I. They are dressed as 
I. If I met them in the streets of London I 
might sometimes think them stout and unlovely, 

I141I 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

but now they are changed. It is as if that line 
which they hold above the stream were some 
fairy root by which they were planted at the 
river's side, drawing up through it the still con- 
tentment of the grasses and the flowers. 

We used to meet them on Sunday mornings on 
the Fishermen's Train to Amberley which 
started when London had scarcely begun to 
wake, and the early stillness of Victoria was un- 
disturbed except by the gathering of these men 
from their many homes, each setting out for the 
meadows of the Arun with his rod in its case and 
at his side his great basket, of which I have never 
been able to determine, either going or returning, 
whether it was full or empty. We alone, carrying 
walking-sticks, were not of the brotherhood. 

From the Station of Amberley we would pour 
out with them into the road, a little crowd all 
bristling with fishing rods, like a dock-side with 
masts. And then, in a moment, we would be 
alone. They had turned suddenly downwards 
and we had turned up — ^up beneath a great hedge 
of privet, hazel, and clematis, walking on turf that 
was all purple with thyme, and giving thanks 
that so few men, even when they are not fisher- 
men, will go up hill when they can go down. 
Giving thanks I say — ^for fishermen are still only 

[142] 



THE FISHERMEN OF AMBERLEY 

men until they are dispersed along their river 
bank, immobile, contented, rooted deep in the 
stream. That path would take us up until, far 
away, we could feel that dim emptiness which 
was the sea, and behind us was sombre Parham 
wood with its long grey house, half hidden, and 
its lake which seemed on the edge of brimming 
over, and beyond it the grey towers of Amberley, 
and one curve of the Arun gleaming among the 
meadows where, unseen, the fishermen now sat. 

So in solitude we went all day, by open turf 
and twisted thorn, until at evening we would find 
a road, and turn again towards Amberley, the 
chill east and the coming of night behind us, 
while in front the sunset blazed like a noble fire 
lit to welcome the gods as they came home, and 
the meadows of Arun were a great plain before 
us, full of loneliness and enchantment. 

And then, at the last turn of the road round a 
shoulder of the Downs, we would see below us, 
not gods going home, but all the fishermen. 
They came, climbing up very slowly, out of the 
deep fields, and stepping along the road, and 
across the grey four-spanned bridge of Arun, 
with such an air of ripe leisure and contentment 
as is not to be described. Then they gathered 
round the door of the Bridge Inn. Above them 

[143] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

the train waited in the station — their train — as 
if it would wait on until the last and slowest of 
them had set down his tankard and had come. 

There is no sight in the world — ^not cows as 
they go in to milking, nor the smoke of cottages 
rising in the quiet air at dusk, nor children sleep- 
ing when they are tired with happiness, nor men 
at ease with their pipes when they have eaten 
at the end of a hard day — no sight so full of the 
ease of this world, of bodies satisfied and minds 
at peace, as that slow ingathering of the fisher- 
men of Amberley on a summer evening. 



[144] 



THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 

nPHE rain had begun again before we left the 
-■• road with its low walls of grey stone. By 
the time that we had crossed the first field and 
reached the stream which we meant to follow 
up the valley, it was falling with a steadily 
increasing stroke. We pushed on. The hills 
stood high about us. The valley was deep and 
sheltered. Its heavy wet grass pressed against 
our knees as we moved toilsomely through it, 
and the clumps of heather shook the water over 
our feet. The disappearing hills and the still air 
itself seemed to be turning to grey water. We 
no longer felt the rain as a separate thing. A 
wet and breathless heat wrapped us about. 
We panted for dry cool air, and the only good 
thing, in all that clammy prison where we 
struggled, was the stream. Its cool and tum- 
bling brown water seemed altogether difi^erent 
from the grey rain which choked us, until we 
almost felt that we should breathe again if only 
we plunged our faces into its pools. 

[ 145 ] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

We struggled on for two hours, leaving the 
stream, climbing over turf that was covered with 
broken boulders, and ploughing our way up a 
little path of screes. So at last we came to the 
head of the pass where great rocks stood firm in 
the turf and the moss ; and there the world sud- 
denly and splendidly changed. We met and 
knew the rain again. It no longer wrapped us 
round, grey, silent and stifling, but came at us 
with quick cold strokes that stirred us like a song. 
For the wind was behind it. He filled us with 
life. 

He is the great magician of the hills. Without 
him that day had been nothing but the blank, 
unchanging wetness of the sky lying on a dreary 
sodden earth. With him, blowing his unseen life 
through it all, the sky and the earth were magic- 
ally changed. Everything in those wet hills and 
the clouds above them, seemed, as he passed, 
to take shape, to put on a strange half-human 
life, to move as if it came from some other world 
beyond the hills; and then, as the wind fell, its 
life went out. 

We crossed the pass, and climbed by a broken 
path up the side of the valley beyond. Across 
it we could see the rain moving along the face of 
the hill. It went in slender shadowy lines, one by 

[146] 



THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 

one, that stopped and gathered in the valley end, 
hiding the pass by which we had come. They 
were like beautiful half-formed figures of night 
coming out of the clouds. As they went so 
statelily by, brushing the earth and turning its 
colours grey, they might have been the ghosts of 
the sunbeams. 

The wind blew, and the ghosts passed; and 
other and stranger forms came up from the 
valley — ^great lazy white clouds that seemed to 
fondle the hills as they drifted by them ; and a line 
of black cloud, with an edge straight as a sword, 
and in its darkness a glow of bronze, a cloud like 
the sinister, half-formed shape of an invading 
army; and clouds that pushed grotesque heads 
across the hills, like monsters coming out of the 
fairy tales to burn whole valleys with their 
breath. 

All the clouds and the rain and the great bare 
hills were as full of the life of that half-world 
which lies between plants and men as are the 
woods and the streams in the old tales. But 
when the wind passed their life went out, and the 
clouds and the rain melted once more into dismal 
waters. Then he returned, gathering all the 
clouds together, and the grey regiments of rain 
broke out of them, sweeping across the hills, 

1 1471 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

while we bent to them, pushing sightless through 
their ranks. 

Even the little plants of the hillside were 
changed by his coming. He blew through them 
also a breath from a fairy world. The pale 
rushes moved beautifully before him with a sud- 
den glitter like a little water thrown through a 
sunbeam. The brown tufts of grass bent stoical 
heads, and let their ragged hairs go with his 
blast, like patient horses, and the bracken as he 
shook its fronds became suddenly human — a 
crowd of flustered little people, rocking and 
gesticulating with fear, brandishing arms in 
comical despair. Then the wind passed; the 
crowd had gone, and in its place were still, grace- 
ful ferns gathering rain-pearls at the tops of their 
fronds. 

I would not exchange such a day — ^fuU of this 
strange half-comical, half-magical life of the 
clouds and the rain and the hillside, that comes 
and goes with the wind like a ripple or a shadow — 
for all the heat and colour of a clear sky, and the 
wide, sun-dusty view of distant hills. 

But suddenly — it was now the late afternoon — 
the sun came out. At his touch all was changed 
once more, and we with the rest. We came back 
to this comfortable earth. We felt the warmth, 

[148I 



THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 

luxuriously, for we had been wet and dried again 
by the wind three or four times that day. Our 
way was by a level valley. We were tired, and 
yet we walked in an ease that, for the moment, 
was more delightful even than physical rest. The 
wind had gone, taking with him all the clouds. 
The clear hills looked down very friendlily. The 
musical noise of the streams, swelled with the 
rains, rose more and more loudly in the still air. 
All the wild magic of the morning had passed, 
and in its place was a content of this earth. Our 
bodies were happy in their weariness, knowing of 
the rest to come. Our minds dreamed peacefully 
in the sun. 



[149] 



THE ADVENTURERS 

* I 'HERE were two of them, little green fellows, 
'*• swinging bravely above the dust of the 
road. Peering close we could see that each hung 
on a silver thread which seemed attached to 
nothing but the grey air above. One hung his 
full length. The other had curled himself up. 
Sometimes they twirled giddily. Then they 
would drop a little, but neither seemed in a hurry 
to descend. They swung in the wind, and when 
it came with a stronger puff we would see them 
for a moment at the beginning of a swift upward 
curve before they were lost against the green of 
the tree. They seemed to have been blown into 
space or the upper leaves, but each time they 
reappeared, hanging tranquilly above the road. 

Several motor bicycles went by in a roar and 
swirl of dust, and each time we stepped back 
feeling sure that now the two adventurers had 
been destroyed or had been whirled away on a 
more terrible journey, but each time, as the dust 
settled, we found them still secure in space. 

[151] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

They and their invisible ladders were charmed; 
nor did they seem in the least disturbed by these 
devastating interruptions. They took it all in 
the day's journey, as they spun their way to earth 
from the branches of the oak. It is a bold thing 
to come down from that peaceful green world into 
the very middle of a main road on a summer 
afternoon, but no doubt, like other travellers, 
they went cheerfully, being ignorant of the 
dangers about them. 

As they came nearer to earth we stood close 
above them, and the one, with that quickness to 
seize an opportunity which we admire in all the 
great adventurers, immediately made himself 
secure by spinning a second thread from my 
shoulder. Thence he descended to earth. The 
other whirled furiously before us, as the wind 
caught him, swept upwards in a glorious circle, 
and then descending, came to rest on my finger. 
He waved his two front legs languidly, and then 
sank down, as it seemed to me, with the graceful 
exhaustion of the trained performer. I laid him 
among the grasses at the road side. The other 
had already disappeared. 

One does not commonly think of the cater- 
pillar as a graceful thing of the air. He is a pest, 
a furious eater. But when one comes on him 

[152] 



THE ADVENTURERS 

suddenly in the middle of so splendid and peril- 
ous a journey one forgives him for some of the 
many things that he has devoured. He may have 
a voracious stomach, but he has also his spin- 
neret. When you think of the leaves that he has 
eaten to the ribs and the oak trees that he has 
devastated, remember also this silver thread by 
which he travels through space. No one who can 
set out on such a journey is to be altogether 
hated and despised. This adventurer, I thought, 
must somewhere in literature be celebrated as 
something more than a mere destroying insect, 
and I went in search of whoever had written of 
him worthily. First, in an old natural history 
book I found, not a piece of prose but at least a 
picture, the work of an artist whom the cater- 
pillar, poor greedy grub, had moved to feelings of 
awe and even fear. It was an old-fashioned book, 
old enough, that is, to be illustrated not with 
diagrams and plates but with real pictures, and 
this picture showed the processional caterpillar 
on the march. 

It was night. In orderly ranks the caterpillars 
descended a fir tree and crossed the ground 
below. Their leader marched alone. Behind 
him was a rank of two ; behind these were three ; 
behind these again four, and so the ranks went in 

[153] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

ascending scale until they were lost among the 
branches of the fir tree. They advanced like an 
army, and the last touch of horror was given to 
the scene by a dim rabbit in the background, 
flying in terror beneath a shadowy moon. These 
processional caterpillars of that old book were 
very different from their pathetic, yet heroic, 
descendants on whom M. Fab re made his un- 
kind experiments with the flower pot. These, 
one could see, would have swept over and de- 
voured any naturalist so presumptuous as to 
stand across their path. They were the demi- 
gods and giants of the early morning of the 
caterpillar world, for by an imaginative but un- 
scrupulous use of perspective the artist had made 
them appear to be larger than the rabbit. It was 
an enchanting picture — ^but still I had not found 
either the prose or verse for which I sought. 

There is only one caterpillar in Hans Andersen 
and he has not even a story to himself. He 
makes no more than a brief appearance in the 
story of the beetle, as a modest sentimental crea- 
ture, a foil to the beetle's conceit. " How beauti- 
ful the world is," says he, "the sun is so warm 
and everything so happy! And when I one day 
fall asleep and die, as they call it, I shall awake 
as a butterfly." But surely no one who has a 

[1541 



THE ADVENTURERS 

spinneret inside him would ever dream of be- 
coming something else. 

And then at last, I found an old pamphlet, 
very roughly printed, with the date 1659. It had 
the title "The Caterpillars of this Nation, 
anatomised in brief discovery of housebreakers, 
pickpockets, etc. With the life of a penitent 
Highwayman." Here, thought I, was the cater- 
pillar not unworthily treated. He carries his 
rope within him. He is the natural associate of 
the daring criminal and of those also who have 
made heroic escapes. Casanova, Cellini, Baron 
Trenck are among the great caterpillars of 
history. But when I opened the pamphlet I 
found that the caterpillar, after all, was intro- 
duced only on account of his destructive appe- 
tite. Housebreakers and pickpockets, said the 
penitent highwayman (who must either have 
been a hypocrite or an invention of some pious 
sentimental journalist of the Commonwealth), 
are " the catterpillars of this nation which do eat 
into men's estates and lives." 

The search has failed, but I still hope that 
some day, when I am not looking, I shall find the 
poet who has sung of this adventurer as he de- 
serves — of him, and his journeys, and his silver 
rope. 

[155I 



THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 

' I 'HE road to the village at the world's end 
'■' turns aside from a valley in the south of 
England just before this valley reaches the sea. 
It is cut abruptly into the side of the Downs, 
and rises at once in a little hill, so that nothing of 
it is to be seen but the first few yards. Nor, 
though there are scarcely any roads now in all 
the south of England without their sign-posts, is 
there any sign at the corner of this road, and for 
that reason no one would go by it unless he liked 
the look of the road or because he wondered 
whither it went. 

One follows this road, expecting nothing, yet 
wondering all the while what there is to find, and 
then, where the heart of solitude should be, one 
comes to the village at the world's end. 

It is more securely hidden than if it were in the 
middle of a forest without paths, or among the 
deep, unseen folds of the mountains, for it is 
hidden without artifice. It lies in a great bowl of 
the Downs, open from morning until evening to 

[157] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

the sun; and because it is hidden without artifice 
it is all the more beautiful to have found it. 
Moreover of its discovery it can be said (as of few 
of the great discoveries of life, like falling in 
love, or learning that some day one must die) 
that one can remember the exact place at which 
the discovery was made. There is a place on 
that road (and you can return to it) at which 
you knew nothing of this village, and then, be- 
fore another breath was drawn, had found it all. 
At that place you look at it at about the level 
of its little church tower, with ivy growing all 
over it and creeping in at the lips of the wooden 
lattices under its red tiles. It has few houses but 
many trees, all gathered together, as it seems, for 
companionship ; and so near and so modestly do 
its roofs lie at your feet that you feel you could 
almost step across them to the Downs at the 
other side. These things about it are delightful, 
but you do not know at first that this is indeed 
the village at the world's end, though already you 
can see that the road which you have followed, 
which dips from your feet into the village and 
rises beyond it, ends in the turf just below the 
further rim of the Downs, as if those who had 
made it knew very well that beyond that ridge 
was no place to which it could go. 

[158] 



THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 

You do not know at first that this is the village 
at the world's end, because the poets have not 
prepared your mind to find it as it is. In this 
village are no magic casements opening on peril- 
ous seas; nor enchanted woods "haunted by 
woman wailing for her demon lover"; nor such 
things beyond words to tell, as Kilmeny found; 
nor the frozen houses of Tong Tong Tarrup on 
the great crag looking over the edge of the world. 
Yet any one of the poets who have told us of 
these things might have been very well content, 
when he came to the world's end, to find such a 
little English village as this. 

After you have gone down into the village and 
been there for a while you begin to understand, 
even without speaking to any one of its inhabit- 
ants, that belief which is theirs. You begin 
to understand it as you look up on every side at 
that unbroken rim of the great bowl of the Downs 
in which the village lies. It does not tower above 
it, nor menace it, nor fling at it clouds and 
twisted shadows and crooked winds, nor play the 
terrible and grotesque as mountains do to the 
villages at their feet. But it surrounds it very 
gently, and closes all the world to it. 

There is no clock in the church tower. Of a 
clock the village has no need. Its inhabitants 

[159] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

measure the morning by the shadow as it climbs 
and disappears over the eastern rim of their 
great bowl of the Downs, and they measure the 
change of the day towards evening as the shadow 
returns, coming gently as a friend, down the 
western slope of sunlit grass until it touches their 
houses. Across this rim, where their only road 
ends, they watch the day pass. The sea mists 
roll in to them across it as from another world, 
and if a tall man were to stand on tiptoe on their 
church tower he would just fail to look over it. 

By day the gold of the sun makes a mist above 
it, but when the day has burnt out behind it into 
a few grey ashes of cloud which the night wind 
blows away, when all the colours have faded from 
its grass and it is left a dark line, clear and 
mournful against the sky, that great rim of the 
Downs has something not to be described except 
that it is final, satisfying, and complete. It is 
then that you both understand and share the 
simple faith of those who live in this village. For 
while we believe that the world is round and has 
no end at all, and the ancients believed that it 
was flat and that its end was the swift encircling 
stream of Oceanus, their faith is that the world is 
a great bowl and no man may climb to its rim, 
but if you stand on tiptoe on the church tower 

[i6o] 



THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 

you can nearly see over it. For those who live 
in this serene place and see each day pass across 
their world and go out beyond that dark horizon 
of the Downs there could be no other faith. 

One thing more there is in proof that the men 
and women of this village do indeed hold this 
faith, believing that here the world ends and that 
by their road no travellers will come on their way 
to other places. And this one thing also makes 
this village — habitable and familiar as it is — akin 
to those places which the poets discover in the 
borderlands between the worlds. Though the 
poets find them beautiful, containing those things 
that they have never had and desire, and those 
things also that once they had in this world and 
long to find again, yet always there is something 
that is remote, scarcely human, and that chills 
the heart. So also is it with this village at the 
world's end. It has no inn. 



II 



[l6l] 



WINDOWS 

THE war was long since over, but Private Steep 
still lay in a hospital ward, and when he 
talked at all he talked of the war. He would tell 
you that he knew men who had not been able to 
stand it. For himself he was glad to say that it 
had not troubled his nerves. If you asked him 
what he did lying there, he would say that he did 
not do much. He did not care to read, and 
though sometimes people would offer to read to 
him he found it difficult to listen. The sentences 
were too long. He was very well, he would add, 
but he felt tired. The war had been rather a 
tiring job. He liked best to lie and do nothing, 
and look at the white wall opposite. 

It was then that he was moved to the window. 
"Give a man like that nothing but a wall to look 
at and he'll see things on it," said the doctor; 
"he'll see all the things that he ought to forget." 
But by the window he still lay and looked at 
nothing, or at whatever else it was that his mind 

[163] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

saw. He was content with nothing. That was 
his disease. 

He had been by the window a week or more 
when chance brought to that ward a great parcel 
of old magazines, gathered from the tops of book- 
shelves and cupboards. They were only ten and 
fifteen years old, but they seemed more ancient 
than the Flood, and the patients looked curi- 
ously, as into another world, at pictures of for- 
gotten events, at the ascending ages of celebrities 
whom no one now knew, at cartoons of un- 
remembered controversies. 

Private Steep turned them over without inter- 
est. He looked at the pictures with a dull eye. 
He was too tired to puzzle out the jokes. He 
gave up the attempt. And then, as he pushed 
them away, he found between a Punch and a 
Strand Magazine, a book of coloured pictures 
called Mediceval Masters. They were queer, but 
that did not trouble him like the queerness of the 
fashions and the jokes of fifteen years ago. For 
there was something very firm and clear about 
them. 

It was at their brilliant colours that he looked 
first, and then he saw with satisfaction that he 
knew at once what each thing was. He had never 
seen such chairs and cups, strangely shaped and 

[164] 



WINDOWS 

carved, but he knew that they were chairs and 
cups. Nor had he ever seen such women, with 
their long white fingers and wonderful dresses. 

He looked through that book and not until it 
was finished did he remember to be tired. Two 
days later he surprised his nurse by being angry 
because another patient had the book when he 
wanted it. He had not troubled before to be 
angry. 

He was content at first to look at the bright- 
ness of the colours, and at those women who 
were, in some strange way, both beautiful and 
comic. Then he began to look into the pictures, 
at the carving of furniture, and the embroidery 
of dresses. In one an open book lay on a cushion. 
He could see the drawings in the book. He began 
to go round those pictures like a child examining 
a new room. 

It was then that he noticed a picture which 
seemed to him very odd. It was called ''Ma- 
donna Enthroned with Angels,'' but the throne 
was not such as he had ever imagined, and, most 
curious of all, in the throne was a window. He 
looked through the window and saw trees, very 
tall trees as delicate as feathers ; he saw a shore, 
where a man was running down towards the 
quaintest of little ships; and far away on an 

[165] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

island was a shadowy blue city, a city that 
looked as if it had risen straight from the sea. 

He turned through the book again and found, 
what he had not noticed before, that in nearly 
every one of the pictures was a window. Even 
those that were not rooms yet had their windows, 
and none of the windows was empty. Through 
one he looked up a winding valley to hills as blue 
as the sea, and through another at a little town. 
Instead of looking into those pictures he began 
now to look out of them. 

It was the window with the little town that 
pleased him most. For it was a window in a real 
room, a room with a tiled floor, and a three- 
cornered chair, and a carved wooden bench where 
the mother sat feeding her child. The window 
itself was very small, with a heavy iron studded 
frame folded back from it, but through it you 
saw the whole town — chouses, and people walking 
in the square, and a tall church tower, and behind 
it a road that crossed the hills. It was all ex- 
traordinarily small, and far away, but as clear 
as a summer's day. He wished that he could 
have put his head out of that window and seen a 
little more, but it was wonderful how much one 
could see. 

He had long since lost the feeling that in those 

[166] 



WINDOWS 

pictures was anything odd. The women re- 
mained beautiful, but they no longer seemed 
comic. It was right that in gardens and in 
thrones you should find windows looking out on 
other worlds. Then one day he suddenly realised 
that he had a window of his own and had never 
looked through it; and when he came to look 
through it he found, what was still more strange, 
that it was not very unlike the little town 
through the window of the picture. He looked 
down a slope of chimneys and roofs, and across 
them to another slope where houses stood, and 
he could see a tall brick tower with a clock. He 
could see also one bend of a road, where trams 
passed. They were very small but as vivid a red 
as the wonderful dress of the woman in the 
picture. 

It was not as good to look at as the little town. 
At first he disliked it because it was never for 
two days the same, and that troubled him. But 
the more he looked at it the more his interest 
in it grew. Sometimes in the sunlight it was 
almost as clear as the town in the picture, but 
even when the rains drew their grey brush across 
it, he could see the tower with its clock, and the 
bend of the road. 

At last he began to feel a pleasure in its 

[167] 



WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 

changes, and to watch for them — for the coming 
of the sun, and the shadows, and the rain, that 
were always making it look different though they 
left it always the same. 

However much he looked he would never see 
more of the little town, in its perpetual clearness, 
nor find where the road led, that crossed the hills. 
But here was a road below him, and one day 
when he was well he would take the tram along 
it and find where it went. 

The doctor's notes on his case (which were 
published in a medical journal and were read 
with interest by other doctors) described the 
various treatments which led to his recovery. 
But they did less than justice to the book of 
MedicBval Masters, Indeed they did not mention 
it at all unless it was included in the phrase " a 
judicious combination of psycho-therapy and 
occupation." What they did not say was that 
through the quaint windows of those pictures he 
had learnt to look out again on his own world. 



THE END 



[168] 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proc 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2009 

PreservationTechnologi 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVA 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 

Dranhorrv TnvA/nchin PAIfinfiR 



